Participate in The WooCommerce Speed Up Challenge 2022 & Win BIG!

[UPDATED]

Carrying out the practice of celebrating the speed maestros, Cloudways is back with the biggest Hackathon event, i.e., The WooCommerce Speed Up Challenge 2022. We are welcoming performance enthusiasts to showcase their optimization skills and get rewarded BIG for their efforts.

If you think you have what it takes to expedite a slow WooCommerce site into an optimized store that unleashes relentless online growth, now’s your chance to prove yourself.

So let’s get started.

How to Join the WooCommerce Speed Up Challenge

Anyone can join The WooCommerce Speed Up Challenge 2022 for FREE and try their luck.

The challenge is simple: We’ll create the slowest WooCommerce store, and you will have to improve its load time.

Our judges will evaluate each submission carefully, and the participant with the fastest stores will win!

What Will I Win?

We are going generous with the prizes this season and rewarding not one but ten best speed optimizers. So if you win, you will get to brag about being a web optimization guru, but you get away with exciting prizes.

Here’s what we’re giving to our winners:

1st Place:

• $500 hosting credits
• $500 Amazon cards
• $800 worth of gadgets
  • Steel Series Gaming Bundle
  • High-Res Monitor
  • Alexa
  • Drone

2nd Place:

• $300 hosting credits
• $300 Amazon cards
• $500 worth of gadgets:
  • Steel Series Gaming Bundle
  • Alexa
  • Drone

3rd Place:

• $200 hosting credits
• $200 Amazon cards
• $300 worth of gadgets:
  • Steel Series Gaming Bundle
  • Alexa

But it doesn’t end there. Even if you don’t want to participate yourself, you can still win our exciting prizes.

How? By referring your friends.

Yes, we are rewarding our top referrers as well in two ways:

Referral leaderboard

Refer as many friends as you can to top our referral leaderboard, and we’ll reward the top 10 referrals with the following rewards:

• $50 worth of hosting credits
• $50 Amazon cards
• Cloudways T-shirt

Winning referrals

If any of your referrals manage to make it to the top 3; we’ll also reward you with prizes, including:

• $100 worth of hosting credits
• $100 Amazon cards
• Swag box

Rules and Regulations

We know you can’t wait to participate in the challenge, but first, we encourage you to carefully go through the rules.

• Only the entries sent from the official sign-up form will be entertained.
• Send your GTmetrix results in a Word Document with the testing link; also include a summary of your optimization steps.
• We will contact the shortlisted participants on the 14th of November, 2022, via email.
• Changing or altering the theme’s files is restricted. However, you can remove, add, or deactivate the plugins, ensuring the site’s functionality and UI remain intact.
• Removing the number of products and product images is also restricted.

Store Specifications

To ensure the toughness of this challenge, our developers will create a store with the slowest load time possible with these specifications:

• PHP version 7.4
• WordPress version 6.0
• MariaDB version 10.4
• HTTP/2 Enabled
• PHP FPM Running
• 2000+ products
• 20+ plugins

Cheat Sheet

We want the most deserving performance enthusiasts to win, but here are some quick refreshers to help you revisit your speed optimization techniques.

1. 23 Tips to Speed up WordPress Site for Better Performance – A Detailed Guide
2. 10 Best Tips to Speed up WooCommerce in 2022
3. PHP 5.6, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, and 8.0: Performance Benchmarks for WordPress
4. What Makes Cloudways the Fastest WordPress Hosting – Testing & Performance Results
5. How to Use GTmetrix on WordPress And Improve Your Site Speed
6. Why You Need WordPress Lazy Load to Speed up a Web Page?

Winners Announcement – WooCommerce Speed Up Challenge

From setting up an online store to optimizing it, our contestants underwent rigorous challenges. And we are glad to admit that each of them surprised us with their unique optimization hacks. However, amidst the talent pool, few stood out, making it to the final round.

The front runners did exceptionally well, giving us a hard time picking the winners.

However, some players outperformed others by showcasing their talent and made it to the top 3.

We’re excited to announce their names. A Huge shout-out to:

1. Avichay Aharony
2. Shay Toder
3. Jowhar Dudayeb Nabil

Let’s End the Sluggishness

Unleash your inner Flash and speed up our WooCommerce store to prove yourself in the biggest hackathon this holiday season and, of course, win the community’s praises, swag, and exciting prizes.

Also, join our Slack channel exclusively created for the Hackathon event for prompt communication and connecting with other participants and jury members.

Sarim Javaid

Sarim Javaid is a Sr. Content Marketing Manager at Cloudways, where his role involves shaping compelling narratives and strategic content. Skilled at crafting cohesive stories from a flurry of ideas, Sarim's writing is driven by curiosity and a deep fascination with Google's evolving algorithms. Beyond the professional sphere, he's a music and art admirer and an overly-excited person.

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