Down The Performance Rabbit Hole with Saumya Majumder

Saumya Majumder is a web performance specialist, and our conversation went deep into what actually matters when optimizing website speed.

Beyond the Basics

Everyone knows "optimize images" and "minify CSS." Saumya's insights go much further. We talked about rendering strategies, resource prioritization, and the metrics that Google actually cares about.

Core Web Vitals

Google uses three key metrics: LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), INP (Interaction to Next Paint), and CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift). Saumya broke down how each one works and — more importantly — what specifically causes them to fail.

The biggest surprise for most people: INP. This measures how responsive your page is to user interactions. A page can load fast but feel sluggish if JavaScript is blocking the main thread during clicks and scrolls.

Practical Optimizations

Saumya shared specific techniques we rarely hear about: - **Fetch priority hints** — tell the browser which resources matter most - **Speculation rules** — prefetch pages the user is likely to visit next - **Resource hints** — preconnect to third-party domains before the browser discovers them

The Real Talk

Performance optimization has diminishing returns. Going from a 5-second load to 2 seconds is transformative. Going from 2 seconds to 1.5 seconds is nice but rarely worth the engineering effort. Know when to stop.

Watch the full episode for Saumya's specific recommendations and tools.