About the Author: Amit Bhaiya
We hold Adobe Commerce / Magento in rather high esteem here at DotcomWeavers—we’ve been working with the evolving platform and ecosystem for fifteen years, after all. However, that’s precisely why we know that open-source and third-party Magento products often provide our clients with better solutions to their unique challenges than what Adobe offers out of the box.
Prominent among those challenges are Core Web Vitals, playing a huge role in Search Engine Rankings and driving traffic. However, Magento’s monolith design and default Luma frontend has left developers scratching their heads for months and years trying to improve their clients’ SERP rankings only to achieve limited success. The advent of GraphQL provided one alternative solution, enabling developers to build customized progressive web applications (PWAs) as the frontend, but this approach attaches higher go-to-market costs.
In contrast, Hyvä combines the best of both worlds by offering a completely rebuilt frontend theme that leverages a whole new, extremely lightweight stack of Alpine JS and Tailwind CSS and interacts with the commerce backend via GraphQL. And the Page Speed Scores and the Core Web Vital numbers Hyva’s helped eCommerce sites achieve have been through the roof—leading to over 1000 licensed purchases within 3 years of their launch.
That’s why we’ve recently entered into a Bronze Partnership with Hyvä. After using their theme for one of our Magento development projects and witnessing their lauded alternative to Luma first-hand, we knew that providing our clients with the best eCommerce site solutions meant we’d better serve many by implementing Hyvä.
Hyvä’s Impact on eCommerce
Hyvä provides developers and eCommerce sites with an entirely new, native Magento frontend. Their team built it from scratch and to be as lightweight as possible by combining the existing PHP-template system DotcomWeavers is so versed in with a forward-thinking, minimal-JS approach.
As a result, we can deliver optimized performance and site speeds while reducing development costs and timelines.
The Hyvä team achieved this by examining and addressing the gap between Luma’s frontend framework—launched with Magento 2 in 2015—and the significant technology strides made since. And by basing their theme on the same PHP Magento developers already know so well, little to no training is required. In their own words: “One could say that Hyvä is the version of Luma we wished Magento had built. Or the frontend that Luma potentially could have become.”
Contending with Legacy Tech & One-Size-Fits-All Mentalities
Hyvä addresses a crucial segment of Magento eCommerce sites that Adobe Commerce / Magento left admittedly underserved by focusing on PWA Studio over updating and improving Luma. Many eCommerce sites find their sites’ frontend negatively affected as a result—especially small and mid-sized digital storefronts.
Excessive, outdated JS coding dependencies and legacy (sometimes deprecated) technology bogged down performance, but PWA implementations carried expectations of similar JS-heavy complexity, extended timelines, and ballooning costs.
Hyvä saw an opportunity to leverage streamlined and developer-favored Magento features to provide a much-needed solution and alternative for the digital storefronts feeling a bit stranded. And they did so by keeping the Magento 2 features developers favor while significantly reducing the coding requirements and dependencies found in the out-of-box themes.
That said, “significantly reducing” code is a pretty big understatement: the standard Magento theme’s 200+ JavaScript and CSS resources became streamlined into two: AlpineJS and TailwindCSS. Resultantly, Hyvä helps developers like DotcomWeavers provide our clients with a 7.5x megabyte reduction in frontend coding size from 1.5 to 0.2 and performance improvements that match.
Hyvä & Core Web Vitals
Around the same time Hyvä introduced their frontend alternative for Magento sites, Google also introduced its “Core Web Vitals” metric series as a means to monitor website quality and performance when optimizing user experiences. At a high level, the three CWVs target:
- Loading – “Largest Contentful Paint” (LCP) logs how quickly the main content of a webpage loads, with 2.5 seconds or less considered optimal.
- Interactivity – “Interaction Next to Paint” (INP) logs the webpage’s response speed following user actions (e.g., clicking a link, expanding dropdowns, adding items to carts), with 200 milliseconds or less considered optimal.
- Visual stability – “Cumulative Layout Shift” (CLS) logs unexpected page movements (e.g., of text, buttons, layout) often caused by asynchronous resource loading, with 0.1 or less considered optimal.
Our new partner noticeably outperforms the average Luma and PWA Studio site across these CWVs thanks to their extremely lightweight framework and the complexity (or impossibility) of correcting elements negatively impacting scores. And per Deloitte, a mere 0.1-second site speed boost achieves 8-10% conversion, customer spending, and page-view increases.
While Hyvä’s Magento theme won’t provide the same UX customization as PWAs, there is a significant segment that better meets their eCommerce site needs and business goals by choosing the most prominent third-party alternative to Adobe Commerce / Magento’s default frontends.
Hyvä Bronze Partnership
DotcomWeavers’ recent Hyvä implementation for Wayside Gardens gave us first-hand experience demonstrating how impactful their framework will be for some of our clients. Thanks to Magento’s JS dependencies, Wayside Gardens’ poor site performance began significantly affecting their conversion rate, with customers turning elsewhere after experiencing lagging page load times, interactivity, and stability.
Recognizing the primary issue, we began the project to convert their site to Hyva’s theme, quickly delivering a fast, responsive, and engaging eCommerce site. By combining our expertise with Hyva’s significantly reduced development and launch timelines, we minimized Wayside Gardens’ project costs. Moreover, with our extensive Adobe Commerce / Magento expertise—Gold Partner with 70+ certifications—adapting to Hyvä’s PHP environment carried virtually no learning curve.
Wayside Gardens is already seeing major improvements in their conversion rates.
Thanks to our long-held Magento expertise and meeting Hyvä’s criteria for “showcases that distinguish themselves… based on performance, brand recognition, business metrics improvement or awards,” we became an agency partner. This partnership grants DotcomWeavers access to Hyvä’s Gitlab and direct communications, helping us further reduce project timelines, ensure white-glove managed services, notify clients of future updates and relevant information, and provide any other necessary resources and support.
Implement a Hyvä Theme with DotcomWeavers
Digital storefronts turn to DotcomWeavers for eCommerce solutions because we always strive to solve their unique challenges. The best-suited approach is whatever framework or tools enable our clients to achieve their business goals at lower costs and on shorter timelines. To that end, a Hyvä theme implementation will benefit many of our existing and future clients immensely.
Contact us today to learn more about Hyvä’s themes and whether their framework is the best solution for your eCommerce site.
Sources:
Deliotte. MILLISECONDS MAKE MILLIONS. https://www.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/ie/Documents/Consulting/Milliseconds_Make_Millions_report.pdf
Hyvä. AGENCY PARTNER PROGRAM. https://docs.hyva.io/welcome/how-does-the-partner-program-work.html
Hyvä. HYVÄ THEMES LICENSE. https://www.hyva.io/hyva-themes-license.html
Web.dev. WEB VITALS. https://web.dev/articles/vitals
