What is Hyvä?
Hyvä Themes offers a new way to build Magento 2 storefronts. The standard Magento 2 theme, Luma, hasn’t been updated since Magento 2’s release and has become clunky, slow and difficult for developers to work with. You won’t face these same issues with Hyvä themes, it’s designed with speed and efficiency in mind, giving you scores of 100/100 across Google’s core web vitals out of the box
Hyvä (pronounced ‘hoo-vah’) was created by Willem Wigman, a dutch Magento developer who was asked by his wife to help launch an eCommerce website for her small business. He knew it would take him too long to develop with the Luma frontend stack, so he decided to create something different. Willem has kept everything he thinks is great about Magento, but has done away with the elements of Luma that cause inefficiencies and complications.
What are the Benefits of Hyvä Themes?
We’ve already highlighted that the main aim of Hyvä is to resolve the performance issues that come with Luma, but there are a number of other benefits involved in adopting Hyvä Themes:
- Performance
- Reduced complexity
- Reduced costs and time to market
- Improved developer experience
- United developer community
Performance
Let’s dive deeper into why Hyvä improves performance... Luma brought with it hundreds of individual JavaScript files and bloated libraries, Hyvä has replaced these with one single JavaScript framework called Alpine.js that allows developers to achieve simple dynamic reactions with minimal effort. All CSS has also been removed and replaced with Tailwind CSS, which is a framework that can reduce CSS output by over 90% vs traditional methods.
Hyväs lean and modern tech stack:
Why is performance so important? A better page speed score has SEO benefits as search engines favour more efficient sites, so if you want more organic traffic (who doesn’t?) then you need to make sure your site is snappy on both mobile and desktop.
In addition to this, it’s been proven that site speed has a direct impact on conversion rate, some studies have suggested that a site that loads in 1 second has a conversion rate 3x higher than a site that loads in 5 seconds.
Efficiency
With efficiency at its core, Hyvä themes is easy to maintain and provides a much better experience for the developers working on your site. Although relatively new in the world of Magento, Hyvä already has a strong community of supportive developers (over 800 on their Slack channel!). This means there are a number of developers working on the compatibility of existing extensions as well as developing new ideas and solutions.
Due to the minimalist architecture behind Hyvä, there’s less frontend code and files for your developers to sift through, making it easier for them to work on new features and debug issues. This means less hours and less budget used on the development of your website.
Hyva vs PWAs
A PWA (Progressive Web App) is a type of application software served via the web. They’re favoured for their increased performance and likeness to a traditional app, however they often take much longer to build than a traditional Magento storefront.
Hyvä is seen as offering the best of both worlds with its increased performance whilst not taking up as much resources as a PWA.
PWAs are often better suited to businesses with large budgets that require a large amount of customisation, for many other merchants Hyvä could provide a more suitable choice.
Things to Consider
Before choosing Hyvä as an approach for your Magento store, it’s important to consider the potential hurdles you might face along the way. Firstly, if you’re on Magento 2.3 or earlier, you’ll need to upgrade before or during your migration to Hyvä as it requires 2.4 or later to function correctly.
At this moment in time, Hyvä doesn’t come with a new checkout, however there are a number of solutions that can be integrated with the framework. You can use any checkout that is compatible with the Luma theme by utilising the Hyvä fallback theme module. The Hyvä team have also created their own checkout tooling, which isn't a 'plug-and-play' option but provides a base for developers to use to create a bespoke checkout. We love using Swissuplabs' Fire Checkout which works great alongside Hyvä.
Unfortunately, not all third party extensions will be compatible with Hyvä out of the box and therefore will require some development to get them working on your new Hyvä site. However it’s worth noting that this only applies to frontend output and all backend code, external integrations and admin panel outputs are not affected.
Due to the ever-growing developer community, a number of modules have already been made compatible and these are then shared with the community free of charge. These modules are submitted to the ‘Hyvä Themes Compatibility Library’ for other agencies and developers to use.
Hyvä is currently compatible with Magento 2 Open Source, however this is not the case for Adobe Commerce. The Hyvä team are currently working on making their framework compatible with all Adobe Commerce features and expect this to be complete in a matter of months
What about my Website Design?
If you already have a Magento 2 site, you don’t need to worry about starting from scratch if you’re considering Hyvä. You are simply replacing the site’s theme and your developers can recreate your current site’s look and feel for you, the backend of your site will also remain the same.
As we’ve mentioned above, out of the box Hyvä can achieve page speed scores of 100, however if you’re loading your site up with numerous complex features then this score will drop. Moving to Hyvä might provide the perfect opportunity to reevaluate some of your site features in favour of a super speedy site with a great user experience!
How we can help you harness Hyvä
As a Hyvä supplier, whether you’re looking to use Hyvä & Magento 2 to power your eCommerce site or are looking to migrate from Luma to Hyvä, our specialist UK based developers would love to discuss your next project. We’ve been carefully crafting bespoke sites for our clients since 2010, with a wealth of experience in customising extensions and extending functionality to suit the unique needs of our clients. Check out how we can help excel your brand with Hyvä Themes.
