At Walmart, I was a key contributor on a performance-focused team that drove measurable improvements to Google's Core Web Vitals (CWV) across millions of product pages. By moving these pages from "Poor/Needs Improvement" to "Good" in Google's CWV categorization, we unlocked significant SEO gains with real business impact.
First Input Delay (FID) – Before its deprecation, I led efforts to reduce P75 FID from over 300ms to under 50ms. This involved deep analysis of performance traces, React profiling, and real-device testing. We identified and optimized a heavily used component causing excessive re-renders, resolving the primary input bottleneck.
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – We pioneered the use of the then-new 103 Early Hints in partnership with our CDN, allowing clients to begin fetching stylesheets and LCP-critical assets during server response time. This significantly improved LCP, bringing P75 times below the 2.5s threshold.
Interaction to Next Paint (INP) – When INP became a Core Web Vital, we rapidly improved our P75 from over 1000ms to under 200ms. This was achieved through splitting long tasks, reducing React re-renders, optimizing hydration, and strategically triggering full-page navigations to improve responsiveness.
Our team’s work allowed Walmart to outpace its ecommerce peers in CWV score improvements, and our innovations with Early Hints and our INP-related performance improvement patterns served as a model for future performance work across the company.
