Why We are Hyvä Partners

One of the most common requests that any Magento agency hears from their clients is “Please improve our Page Speed Insights Score”. This is no surprise, with Google constantly warning brands that their businesses will be penalised in search results if they do not reach that elusive score of 90+.

Developers spend hours working through lists of recommendations, reducing CSS, implementing CDNs, properly utilising cache and, while all of these things are important and will help and the perceived page load speed for customers would improve, many Magento sites still score poorly.

The finger is then pointed at Magento - there’s too much javascript required, the technology is outdated and it’s just too large and complex an application to compete in terms of speed and performance. We’ve seen brands being told to accept the slow speeds as a necessary part of using a platform as powerful as Magento, or that they should migrate their stores to other platforms like Shopify.

Many turned to PWAs and headless technology as the silver bullet to finally allow Magento to compete with faster competitors in an ever-growing market of e-commerce platforms. These options both offer increased page speed and seamless front-end user experience, especially on mobile devices which have long been a particular focus for Google’s rankings.

But headless website builds come with many of their own problems, not least the cost of building them. De-coupling the front and back ends of a site requires the use of APIs and often vast amounts of bespoke development which is technically complex and extremely costly. Add to this the fact that due to the nature of the build you can find yourself reliant on a single agency/developer to maintain the store as they are the only ones who know the code.

Then, in early 2021, a new player appeared. Created by a group of developers and engineers who believed that Magento not only could, but should, be as fast as any of its competitors, Hyvä (pronounced hoo-va) represents a hugely exciting development in the conversation around what is and isn't possible.

The core principles of Hyvä are:

• Reduced complexity
• Improved performance
• Improved developer experience
• Improved development velocity
• Reduced dependencies
• Reduced learning curve

Put simply, this means faster websites, quicker (therefore less expensive) builds and code that is much easier to learn and handover to developers.

Unlike many Magento themes, Hyvä is not based on Luma (the default theme for Magento site sites) but was built from scratch. All of the weight slowing things down was removed - layout.xml, phtml and all javascript were taken away in order to create something lightweight and easy to use.

The use of TailwindCSS and AlpineJS makes updating the design of your site much quicker, allowing for more flexibility and allowing agility when responding to customer behaviours and feedback.

All of this makes Hyvä very exciting for us agencies, especially our developers, but what does this mean in real terms for brand owners and site users?

In short, Hyvä means we now have a theme and frontend framework that feels lightning fast to browse and shop and, importantly, will get those top scores in Google Pagespeed Insights.

Wind & Kite are extremely proud to be an official Hyvä partner agency as we share their belief in Magento as the best solution for merchants of all sizes. And we aren’t the only ones, many other agencies are also working with Hyvä and, crucially, the major extension providers have also partnered with them to ensure their modules are compatible their framework. This means modules from providers such as Amasty, Mirasvit, Mageworx and more are all offered and there is no need to lose functionality.

A full list of compatible modules can be found on Hyvä's board, along with the planned module roadmap.

We love building with Hyvä. It allows us to build beautiful sites that perform and convert - and to do this much faster than previously possible and for much lower costs.