Magento 2 Hyvä Theme: Everything You Should Know

The success of e-commerce stores mostly depends on converting website visitors into customers. However, low-performing websites can distract users and influence purchases. To thrive in the competitive sphere of e-commerce, it’s crucial to regularly optimize and improve your website to provide the best shopping experience for first-time and returning customers.

Magento 2 ecommerce platform, besides its vast opportunities, has faced performance challenges and forces merchants to seek solutions. Recently, the Hyvä theme emerged as a performance game-changer for Magento 2, promising excellent speed scores and improved overall user experience. Even though it’s a relatively new occurrence, so far there are many real-life cases where leading retailers migrated to the Hyvä theme.

In this article, we’ll take a deeper look at the Magento 2 Hyvä theme, its functionality, benefits, potential challenges, real-world examples, and, most importantly, we’ll answer the question of whether the Hyvä theme really helps Magento 2 stores reach their full performance potential.

What is Hyvä Theme?

Hyvä is an open-source frontend theme for Magento 2 built with a completely different approach than standard Magento 2 themes. Above all, it prioritizes speed and reduces complexity, eliminating resource-heavy elements and relying on only lightweight frameworks like Alpine.js and Tailwind CSS. As a result, it provides outstanding website speed, user-friendly design, and a much easier development process.

Today, Hyvä is a recognized technology among developers and has been adopted by many Magento 2 stores. Its growing popularity can be seen in the screenshot below from BuiltWith. The statistics show the number of Hyvä websites included in top ratings by traffic throughout the last 4 years.

According to Wappalyzer, more than 3000 live websites around the world have adopted the Hyvä Magento 2 theme, with the vast majority of them in the USA and Netherlands. The theme was primarily created by a team of developers and designers based in the Netherlands, but its success and the open-source nature of the project have led to developer contributions and growing popularity worldwide.

Is Hyvä Theme Really as Fast as They Say?

The outstanding feature of Hyvä is its high-performance score out of the box, which is hard to achieve with Luma or any other theme. Let’s see how high that score is compared to other popular ecommerce platforms.

In the HTTP Archive Technology report, we can see that only 27% of Magento stores built on traditional themes have good CWV scores, which makes it the worst-performing platform among WordPress and Shopify.

However, the Hyvä theme significantly speeds things up – almost half (48%) of Hyvä-based Magento stores excel in CWV, outperforming WordPress and being much closer to Shopify (a self-hosted platform difficult to compete with).

How does Hyvä make it happen?

That’s because of the minimalist approach, which is the cornerstone of all improvements. To reduce the page size and loading time, the Hyvä theme removes unnecessary code and components that are often used in Magento 2.

Also, the Hyvä theme implements modern and lightweight technologies, such as Alpine.js, Tailwind CSS, GraphQL, and others, which significantly contribute to performance optimization.

This combination of factors makes the Hyvä theme for Magento 2 an exceptionally powerful choice, outperforming its alternatives by over 250% in Core Web Vitals.

Hyvä Theme Benefits

Unlike Luma or other standard themes for Magento 2, which rely on a complex structure and hundreds of Magento core components, Hyvä primarily uses only TailwindCSS and AlpineJS for styling and interactivity. Thanks to this simplified structure, the Magento 2 frontend can be made much faster and developer-friendly.

Generally, Hyvä theme offers a range of advantages for both merchants and developers:

Benefits for Merchants

Improved Performance: Performance is the most remarkable feature of the Magento 2 Hyvä theme. Thanks to this, you can reach unparalleled scores, boosting the user experience and customer satisfaction on the website.
Enhanced User Experience: The Magento Hyvä theme prioritizes design simplicity, speed, and adaptability to create a visually appealing and intuitive shopping experience. Mobile responsiveness ensures a seamless shopping experience across all devices.
SEO-Friendly: With Hyvä theme, the website experiences a serious boost in SEO. That’s because Hyvä prioritizes the factors that search engines value: speed, user experience, and technical correctness. As a result, it increases the website visibility and drives sales.
Lower Maintenance Costs: The Hyvä theme is a cost-effective solution in the long run compared to standard themes for Magento 2. It uses simpler code than any Magento theme, which requires less development time and maintenance efforts.

Benefits for Developers

Faster Development: The Hyvä theme’s structure is a much simpler and more intuitive approach and reduces the number of dependencies to only Alpine.js and Tailwind CSS. All these aspects contribute to a faster and more efficient development process, eliminating the need to deal with complex codebases.
Flexibility and Customization: The Hyvä theme was built with a modular structure, which makes it easier to customize or replace each component independently without affecting the entire theme. Moreover, the separation between frontend and backend allows to customize the layout, styling, and functionality independently, having more control over the theme’s design and logic.
Active Community Support: Hyvä has a strong and active community of passionate developers who are open to knowledge sharing, discussions, and collaboration. This thriving environment contributes to the development of hundreds of Hyvä-compatible extensions and other pre-built solutions that facilitate development.

Top Hyvä Theme Challenges & Solutions

Whether it’s Hyvä or any other theme for Magento 2, there is always a place for some potential complications. We prepared some of the most common pitfalls encountered when working with Hyvä theme for Magento 2 to be ready to face them.

Limited Extension Compatibility

Mostly, Magento 2 frontend extensions aren’t perfectly compatible with Hyvä. While modules built to optimize the admin panel processes work seamlessly on Hyvä, extensions that modify frontend blocks or themes are usually incompatible and break the layout. That’s because these extensions are built on Hyvä-incompatible technologies.

Solution: An optimal solution for this complication is thorough testing and alternative approaches. If compatibility problems arise, search for alternative extensions or use built-in Hyvä functionalities to achieve desired results. As another option, consider custom development to modify code according to the Hyvä requirements.

Limited Customization Options Compared to Standard Magento Themes

t might seem that due to its minimalist approach and simpler development process, the Hyvä theme is restrictive in customization, especially when compared with a complex Magento theme.

Solution: However, Hyvä is quite flexible and uses many modern approaches to achieve the best results. For example, Tailwind CSS technology allows developers to style granularly and create unique components. Additionally, integrating third-party extensions can expand functionality.

Performance Issues

Sometimes, websites don’t achieve the expected excellent performance results with the Hyvä theme. The reason is not in the theme itself but rather in implementation choices. Unoptimized images, slow-loading fonts, and poorly managed dynamic content can affect performance. While the Hyvä theme for Magento 2 uses simplified technologies, it is still crucial to have a strong understanding of web performance best practices.

Additionally, server-side factors, such as slow response times, can impact overall website speed, regardless of the theme used.

Solution: To address the performance challenges, it is possible to prioritize image optimization, script management, and careful consideration of dynamic content. Also, to streamline the page load time, you can use lazy load for images, minify JavaScript and CSS, and leverage browser caching. However, consistent performance testing is paramount as it helps to identify and prevent any issues.

Experience Hyvä Without the Hassle!

Discover the ease of Hyvä with our expert team by your side. We streamline the implementation process, enhancing performance and ensuring smooth results.

How Hyvä Theme Transformed Popular Brands

Many websites have already taken advantage of Hyvä Theme’s ability to achieve significant improvements in revenue, speed, and user experience. Based on 4 case studies, let’s see how Hyvä drives these remarkable results.

Iron Company

IRON COMPANY was one of the first online vendors in the fitness equipment industry. IRON COMPANY has grown from a small venture into one of the top ten providers of gym equipment and flooring solutions for the US Government.

One of the significant challenges IRON COMPANY encountered was ensuring a fast and efficient user experience on our Magento 2 platform. As time progressed, the resource-intensive nature of the default Magento 2 theme became resulted in slow load times and inconsistent performance, particularly for mobile users, which negatively affected the overall shopping experience as mobile traffic grew. This realization led the company to transition to the Hyvä theme, which offered a more efficient and lightweight framework. With the transition, they achieved significant results:

Core Web Vital’s performance score reached 95 on product pages and a remarkable 99 on the homepage and category pages.
Even on mobile devices, the site passed all Core Web Vitals.
+ 6.79% in clicks from SERP
+12.23% increase in impressions
+12% increase in conversions
+12% increase in revenue

Read a full case study at hyva.io about how Pumrocket helped Iron Company smoothly switch to Hyva themes.

Citizen Watch

Citizen Watch is a company that specializes in crafting eco-friendly watches. It is recognized for Eco-Drive technology, which harnesses solar power to avoid the need for battery replacement.

Entering a new phase in company growth, they struggled to attract new customers, so they started to search for ways to overcome this complication. Together with Adobe Commerce Partner, they identified the key areas for improvements:

Website speed and performance,
Website usability,
Mobile experience.

Hyvä Implementation: Leveraging the store’s problem areas, the agency got started by creating a modern website that aligns with the brand’s premium image. Implementing the Hyvä theme for Magento allowed the addition of product details, high-resolution images, and interactive features, which significantly improved the customer experience.

Results: Since adopting Hyvä, Citizen Watch has reported an increase in traffic, +65% new users, and +78% page views. Compared to results before the implementation of Hyvä, it is remarkable that conversion rates are up 43%, while revenue is enhanced by an impressive 141%. This case study shows the necessity of a well-organized and user-friendly website to drive sales. Read a full case study on the official Hyvä website.

Hajduk

Hajduk is a Croatian football legacy club that has over a hundred thousand registered fans. Their website
is an enjoyable platform for fans, where they can get early access to game tickets, exclusive discounts, and more just by subscribing to membership.

The website constantly experienced instability issues, which happened during high-traffic moments after important games. Beyond this, it was necessary to refresh the website navigation and content management to establish a comfortable environment for football fans.

Hyvä Implementation: Hyvä’s modern, top-notch technologies remarkably improved the website instability issues, making the process easier and simpler. Also, during the update, the website design was significantly improved, boosting the overall customer experience.

Results: Since launching the updated website version, no stability problems have been noticed, even during high traffic peaks. With the Magento 2 Hyvä theme, Hajduk’s website has experienced a dramatic performance boost. Homepage speed increased by 58.45%, category page speed by 63.06%, and product page speed increased by 42.9%. Remarkably, the SEO score reached 100, which is impressive. Follow the full case study on the official Hyvä website.

Dunkin’

Dunkin’ is a globally recognized quick-service restaurant, and this particular case study is about the website for the United Kingdom.

The very first Dunkin’ website was just a catalog of items available physically in the store or via on-demand delivery services. So, it was paramount to create a fast, user-friendly e-store within the short term to sell products directly to consumers.

Hyvä Implementation: Magento was selected as the foundation for the Dunkin’ website, and further Hyvä Magento 2 theme was used as well. The theme was beneficial in this case as it allows to ensure a smooth purchasing experience and build a website from scratch within a short period of time.

Results: Now, Dunkin’ has a user-friendly website that sells online without third-party delivery services. Improvements, which brought Hyvä and other strategic choices, boosted organic traffic by 6.1%, the engagement rate increased by 38.5%, time spent on the website increased by 80%, and 30% increase in returning users. Learn more about the case study at Hyvä.io.

Conclusion

Hyvä is a relatively new frontend framework that has rapidly gained popularity due to its modern technology stack. Thanks to it, Hyvä-based Magento websites get better out-of-the-box performance, becoming faster up to 250%. However, sometimes Core Web Vitals don’t reach 100 scores because of improper implementation and other challenges, such as third-party extensions’ incompatibility. So, despite effective and simplified technologies, developers need to have grounded knowledge of web performance to ensure high performance.

When properly implemented, Hyvä consistently outperforms standard Magento themes and drives sales. That’s why the Hyvä theme for Magento 2 is the ideal choice for businesses looking to maximize website speed, enhance user experience, and improve SEO.