Background

Walmart knew they needed to modernize their website to improve user experience and increase revenue. They decided to build out their website with React, expecting the change to increase traffic substantially. Unfortunately, they found their extensive update yielded a traffic increase of just 1-4%, which indicated that their load speeds hadn’t improved as much as they had expected. Walmart knew there was room for improvement, so they called in Formidable to get to the bottom of what was slowing things down.

Challenge

Walmart had already invested in re-architecturing their website in React, so Formidable needed to dig into the details to increase the speed of the Walmart Checkout system and improve conversion rates.

Solution

Formidable began the process by auditing the existing Checkout app to determine what improvements could be made. During the two week audit, we found a critical mass of legacy code that needed to be pared down to improve load times. After presenting findings and suggesting improvements, Formidable was able to reduce the code bundle from 1.1MB to 617KB in the course of one week. From there, we continued to work with the Walmart team to improve and optimize code, choosing updates strategically to ensure that the payoff would be worth the effort required. Working collaboratively gave us a chance to train the Walmart team on best practices, enabling them to improve other portions of their website once our work was done.

Results

Formidable was able to reduce the Walmart Checkout bundle of code by nearly 50%, which led to a huge improvement in speed and performance. Formidable also successfully trained the Walmart team on React best practices.

Benefits

The updates Formidable made to the Walmart Checkout code bundle greatly improved performance, which, in turn, improved conversions, and ultimately increased sales and revenue. Because the Walmart team is now well-versed in React best practices, they can apply the principles used to optimize the Checkout code bundle to their entire code base, giving them the opportunity to increase performance and conversions across the board.

Conclusion

Formidable was able to provide Walmart with a custom solution that resulted in huge performance improvements. Thanks to Formidable, the Walmart Checkout app now works better than ever.