About ThetaRay
ThetaRay is the developer of SONAR, a groundbreaking, AI-powered, transaction monitoring SaaS solution for cross-border payments. They are a winner of this year’s “Transaction Security Innovation Award,” acknowledged by Gartner and Frost & Sullivan for its innovative threat detection solutions. With a client list that includes financial powerhouses like Banco Santander, ThetaRay’s AI solutions allow banks and PSPs to expand their business opportunities by achieving safe and reliable cross-border payment monitorization. ThetaRay recently inked a global partnership with Google Cloud to protect banks and other payment infrastructure companies against money laundering activity hidden within cross-border transactions.
Identifying the pain points
With growing international recognition, increasing demand for its security services, and a planned shift towards developing new use cases, ThetaRay’s Senior Director of Marketing Ilana Ben Sason knew that they needed an effective, reliable web presence. Yet the site was not performing as well as they knew it should.
Poor site performance
Ilana and her team identified their website’s two main pain points. The first was the site’s sluggish performance.
“Our loading times were quite long — you just aren’t supposed to have loading issues opening a page of text and some images,” Ilana said. Despite exploring possible problems such as the site’s underlying code and hosting, they were unable to get to the root of why the site was slow.
Unscheduled downtime and unexplained glitches
Lack of reliability and unscheduled downtime were ThetaRay’s second complaint. Describing the issues Ilana said, “Too often we experienced glitches — all of a sudden the site would be down, or some of our pages would be down, or some of them simply wouldn’t load.” This would happen at all hours of the day and night affecting ThetaRay’s global customer base.
ThetaRay needed a more robust hosting solution, one that would ensure the site’s availability around the clock. The intermittent downtime of the website was reflecting poorly on the overall reliability of the company.
Switching to Strattic
Ilana turned to Strattic, the WordPress hosting solution that automatically generates a static, headless website from their WordPress site. According to Ilana, the change to Strattic eliminated all their key complaints, while providing immediate gains.
Immediate performance gains
Addressing the website performance issues that had previously plagued ThetaRay under the old hosting, Ilana saw major differences she attributed directly to the move to Strattic. .
“Our site wasn’t in a good place before, and our main complaint, the loading times, is something that Strattic has completely resolved.”
Testing that was done before and after moving to Strattic showed that Thetaray improved on all meaningful site performance metrics, including:
- Time to first byte (TTFB) went from from 3.338s to 0.335s, an improvement of 9x
- Start render went from from 4.8s to 1.8s, improvement of 2.7x
- First contentful paint (FCP) went from 4.848s to 1.815s, an improvement of 2.7x
- Largest contentful paint (LCP) went from 5.448s to 2.048s, an improvement of 2.7x
The massive improvement is clear in the Core Web Vitals data shown below. Core Web Vitals are increasingly critical for enterprises’ web ranking as well as SEO and CRO conversions. They are also a good indicator of real-world user experience.
| Before Strattic Largest Contentful Paint |
After Strattic Largest Contentful Paint |
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| Cumulative Layout Shift | Cumulative Layout Shift |
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Always On Uptime
Since the move to Strattic, ThetaRay’s site is always available. Regarding the change, Ilana says,
“Since we moved to Strattic, we have not had any downtime issues and the site has been online with pages loading faster than ever.”
Unrivaled Strattic support
One thing that everyone at ThetaRay who has been in contact with the Strattic team agrees on is the high quality of the support they received. As one of the main liaisons to Strattic support, ThetaRay’s Marketing Specialist Sahar Dorkam has this to say:
“Moving to Strattic, it was very reassuring to have someone who was always willing to help. I felt the team always gave extra added value to anything I needed. Strattic support answers every question. I never left a conversation not knowing exactly why something happened.”
“With Strattic I knew that I had support I could rely on. I know I’ll get an answer, I’ll get results, and I’ll have a solution.”
Good vendors like Strattic are not easy to come by
After six months with Strattic, ThetaRay has put their current site issues behind them. They are now moving forward on proactive tasks like developing a new site in the Strattic development environment and expanding the scope of their services and marketing initiatives.
Asked if they are happy with the results of the move, Ilana responds:
“I would recommend Strattic on the basis of performance, reliability and security alone. That said, I think the strongest element for me is the value of a vendor who holds their customer service at such a high level — that is most important. We work with a lot of external vendors, not just on the web, but in other areas as well.”
“Good vendors like Strattic are not so easy to come by and good customer service is even harder to find.”
in Jerusalem, Israel