Over 300 site speed optimization experts competed in this year’s “WooCommerce Speed Up Challenge”, a prestigious international contest hosted by Cloudways. Out of all the competitors, Avichay Aharony took 1st place. Shay Toder and Jowhar Dudayeb Nabil took the silver and bronze respectively. All 3 medalists are a part of SpeedSize’s website optimization team. SpeedSize is an Israeli AI-media optimization company that has revolutionized compression using the principles of neuroscience. It is the world’s first company with the ability to recreate media ~90-99% smaller in file size, while retaining the original sharp quality. This makes it possible for websites to load 10x faster and improve their visitors’ visual experience, which helps brands convert more online sales.

The Cloudways competition required participants to take a heavy, slow-loading website and improve its loading speed and Google Core Web Vitals metrics. Using SpeedSize™ tech and their personal expertise they dwarfed the competition.

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Recently, SpeedSize™ expanded its team, headed by Yotam Yarimi, to offer Pagespeed Optimization. They recruited Shay Toder, an internationally-renowned expert in site optimization, to lead these efforts. Toder has medalled 4 times (2 gold) in the Speed Up Challenge and has a large following as a thought leader on website optimization. He manages the largest PageSpeed Optimization Facebook group in Israel and is currently spearheading an effort to create an automated AI Pagespeed Optimization Platform.

Toder remarked, “It’s incredibly exciting to see the methods we use for site optimization at SpeedSize™ produced such great results in the competition. The most crucial element to our win was SpeedSize’s AI-media optimization. Making sites smaller in file size is crucial to loading speed.”

Toder adds how important site speed is for the ecommerce industry: “Online consumers today are much more sensitive to user experience, with less patience for slow-loading. Extra loading time costs website owners lots of money. Google says this outright, and penalizes slow sites in search rankings. They released a Page Experience Update, early this year to measure user experience and site speed is the most impactful metric. Faster sites help eCommerce brands improve their conversions, lower cart-abandonment and increase organic traffic.”

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