Web page loading time can be a sore spot for many content and commercial websites. This often leads to bad user experience, high bounce rate, and soon will harm a site’s Google rating. Zaraz, an Israeli startup that has developed a system based on a single line of code to help boost page performance, closed a $2 million Seed funding round. The investment was led by PICO Venture Partners, with participation from Y Combinator, Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, F2 Capital, and Stormbreaker VC.

Slashing loading times with a single line of code

Coming up this May, Google is set to reconfigure its algorithm so that website rating is heavily impacted by the web page’s loading speed and user experience. This oncoming change will require many websites to find solutions to upgrade their loading speeds - to prevent a fall in Google ratings, or god forbid, find themselves on the second page.

Zaraz developed a tool to help companies and domain holders improve website performance and SEO through a single line of code. The Zaraz system identifies third-party tools running in the background - for example, Google Analytics - and instead of running them on the browser, it sends them to the company’s cloud environment for optimal performance.

“We tested the 5,000 most popular websites in the U.S. and discovered that the average site uploads 22 third-party tools each time. Each add-on slows down website performance, and from our research, we found that on average these third-party tools are responsible for 40% of a page’s load time,” explains CEO Yair Dovrat in a conversation with Geektime.

He notes that the system runs all the web page’s back-end scripts as well. “This means that when someone visits your website, their browser is busy showing them the website, rather than loading different third-party tools,” said Dovrat.

He added that the system times script loading, and instead of pitting all the third-party tools to fight for resources -- the system first allows the site to load, and only then, runs and prioritizes specific tools. “We got to the point where we can load a website without third-party tools or with dozens of tools running through the Zaraz cloud platform. We run it all, without slowing down the web page or compromising on performance,” Dovrat added.

“When implementing dozens of third-party tools, the battle for fast load speeds is already doomed”

What’s the difference from other solutions promising to optimize and accelerate website loading speeds?

Dovrat: “There are very few products that really improve web page loading speeds, with most of the solutions only monitoring and reporting issues, rather than fixing them. There are products that optimize companies’ First party code, meaning the code which was written and controlled by the company’s own development team. The thing is that you can use the fastest CDN to optimize loading speeds for photos and other heavy elements, but when implementing dozens, even hundreds, of third-party tools to a website, then the battle for fast load speeds is already doomed.”

Dovrat provides an example from one of the company’s customers, which eld around 10 million monthly users and marked an immediate 10% increase in conversion rate. Dovrat noted that although SEO improvement is harder to quantify, Zaraz reported pages that climbed 15 spots in Google search as a result of utilizing the Israeli startup’s platform.

Zaraz was founded in 2019 by Yair Dovrat and CTO Yoav Moshe. The company is a graduate of the famed Y Combinator accelerator program. According to the company, the newly acquired funds will be used to further advance technological development.