HOW SPEEDSIZE™ WON THE SPEED UP CHALLENGE
See how our Web Optimization Team swept the awards
THE BEST IN WEB OPTIMIZATION
Three SpeedSize™ employees won all the three medals at Cloudways’ WooCommerce Speed Up Challenge this year. The fourth annual competition attracted over 300 of the best website optimization experts from around the world to turn around a slow-loading website with poor functionality and transform it into a high-performing website whose metrics would theoretically yield explosive growth.
SHAY TODER: THE MICHAEL JORDAN OF PAGESPEED
The main competitive advantage websites employ to improve their Pagespeed and user experience is image and video optimization, and SpeedSize’s neuroscience-based AI-Optimization platform creates an unfair advantage in terms of optimization. However, even with best in class image and video optimization, websites can still perform poorly due to loading and request issues, inefficient coding, long query times and a variety of other technical issues most websites need to be optimized for.
THE STUDENT DEFEATS THE MASTER
The Cloudways Competition is tailor-made for Shay, explaining his dominance over the history of the competition. But in a surprise turn, his former student Avichay Aharony, also a SpeedSize™ employee, took home the gold this year. The competition tests the contestants’ ability to make a slow-loading website with poor functionality work better, without changing the architecture of the code. You could argue SpeedSize™ has an unfair advantage, as this is precisely what they do each day for the websites that need to be optimized, especially in the highly competitive eCommerce sphere, where SpeedSize™ specializes.
According to Shay, “The most crucial element to our win was SpeedSize™’s AI-media optimization.” It led him to improve the total page load time by almost 100% from the previous year. The total page load time Toder achieved was 144 milliseconds, only five milliseconds short of his teammate, Avichay.
Avichay could not be more grateful for the tools he acquired from him and the career it led to in Website Optimization and his gold medal. He credits Shay here, “Shay is a professional at insane levels in improving the speed of websites. His course helped me improve my site’s (Google Pagespeed Index) score to 99/100,” one point shy of the 100 score they were able to achieve in the competition, improving it from a score of 18.
Shay, Jowhar and Avichay all used similar methodologies to improve their Google Pagespeed and GMetrix ratings. One of the main reasons for their win was their ability to maintain all the website’s functionality and appearance while reducing the total page load time from 18 to ~.14 seconds.
THE IMPORTANCE OF CORE WEB VITALS
Beyond that, user experience standards have caught up to our shortened attention spans. Google research confirms that half of a website’s visitors will abandon a website that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. So by ignoring Pagespeed Optimization you’re always losing potential customers.
HOW THE COMPETITION WAS WON
- Lazy load the video (click to load), so i didn’t have the 4MB loaded as one block
- Delay all JS including lazy load JS
- Exclude above the fold images from lazy load
- Images reduced with original quality, served with AVIF/WebP whatever is smallest using SpeedSize™ technology
- PHP 8.1
- WP Rocket integration
- Local hosted assets
- Inline favicon
- Disable sitewide common things
- Disable external fonts
- Preload LCP
- Resize mobile images with smaller width
- Delay loading below the fold content
- Replace icons with base64 for the above the fold icons, and the rest of the icons also replaced with only used minimum size font
- Fix CLS with CSS
- Disable unneeded plugins
- Change Smart Slider 3 slider to Elementor slider, so it will look the same, but with reduced assets
- Use Critical CSS
- Load all other CSS after user interaction
- Load low quality mobile LCP image and change to real image with animation
- Minify CSS+JS
- Remove all CSS calls from the html and inject them later
AI-OPTIMIZE YOUR WEBSITE
All of the above are common issues for websites with slow page load times, but every website is different, which is why you need a custom-tailored solution for your website’s needs. Check out SpeedSize’s Pagespeed Optimization Page to see our full suite of Pagespeed services.
Or just contact our world-leading experts directly here to cut your page load time, drive more traffic to your website and better engage your visitors.
