Now that we have the first six months with Hyvä Themes behind us and the first projects are already live, we want to share our experiences and show the advantages that we have noticed in the development with the new Magento 2 frontend. In particular the shop performance of the online shops developed with Hyvä Themes and the efficient development convinced us.
Hyvä Themes - The basis for an optimal shop performance
As different as our projects with Hyvä Themes are, they have one thing in common: an enormously high Google Lighthouse Score. A score of 90 or more is considered good by Google and is in the green zone. The performance is evaluated by how quickly a website loads the content and by how quickly the page can be interacted with. With a good performance, the basis for a good ranking in search engines such as Google & Co. is created. With Hyvä Themes, a high Lighthouse Score is already guaranteed by default. With our projects, we have made the experience that the new frontend provides the basis for achieving a Lighthouse Score of up to 100. Even after the implementation of individual customer wishes, the performance can be easily optimised on the basis of the lean code.
However not only the ranking in search engines benefits from good performance but also the online shop itself. In particular the bounce rate can be reduced by fast loading times. Milliseconds can already ensure that the bounce rate is reduced. In addition to the bounce rate the loading time also has a positive effect on the conversion rate of a shop. Big names such as Amazon and Zalando have already been able to confirm the correlation and optimise their conversion rate based on milliseconds less loading time. This is because a fast online shop offers more convenience for the user. In addition good shop performance increases trust and the willingness of customers to interact with a page.
See for yourselves:
Efficient development with Hyvä Themes
As a result of the drastically reduced complexity of the Magento frontend development, we were able to notice a significantly increased efficiency in our projects. Compared to frontend development with PWA solutions we were able to save around 2/3 of the time needed for development. In addition the implementation of customer-specific designs proved to be much easier. The already mentioned above-average performance of the online shops with Hyvä Themes could be achieved with significantly less effort. In addition Hyvä Themes has enabled us to make the backend of Magento more accessible via customisations.
Last but not least a huge advantage we have noticed since developing with Hyvä Themes is the satisfaction of our developers. The alternatives for Magento frontend development so far are mainly based on JavaScript. Hyvä Themes on the other hand is inspired by the classic Magento frontend and creates a modern frontend stack from it, bringing back the enjoyment of work to our developers.
This is what our developers have to say about Hyvä Themes:
Magento2 solved a lot of things very well as a framework - the approach to the frontend was well-intentioned but overcomplicated in daily use and for complex designs neither technically nor economically elegant to use for the majority of developers. On the developer side this was always criticised but in all the years since its release, no one took on the fundamental improvement - everyone waited for PWA Studio or tried other Javascript-based solutions. However many developers do not want to develop only in Javascript any longer and cannot achieve completely satisfactory results with these approaches. With Hyvä Themes there is finally a breath of fresh air and the former way of working to implement designs is back - and with everything that Magento2 has already solved, well supplemented by TailwindCSS and AlpineJS, it is simply fun again.
The Magento 2 frontend stack is very complex and from a developer's point of view the performance suffers. The architecture made it difficult to move with the times and apply modern paradigms and techniques. Thanks to Hyvä this is possible again. The application is component-oriented in both theming and logic and there are very few dependencies. With Hyvä the focus is thankfully more on the frontend itself again and no longer on the peculiarities of the Magento framework.