If you’ve been in the Magento community long enough, you’re well aware that change is constantly happening, and there are always enhancements being made to the platform. One of the biggest topics over the last few years has been Hyvä, and how it is transforming Magento websites to be faster, leaving the traditional PWA Studio and Luma front ends in the dust. Before we dive into the technical pieces, let’s start with how Hyvä is different from PWA Studio and Luma.
What is Hyvä, and how does it differ from the default Magento frontend and other frontend solutions like PWA Studio and Luma?:
Hyvä is a more-modern, and performance-focused frontend solution for Magento. It’s built on modern technologies like Alpine.js, TailwindCSS, and GraphQL. This is meant to help provide a faster, more-efficient, and more enjoyable shopping experience compared to the default Magento frontend.
When looking at how Hyvä differs from the default Magento frontend (Luma) and other frontend solutions like PWA Studio, the below are the key differences:
Technology Stack: Hyvä uses modern technologies like Alpine.js, TailwindCSS, and GraphQL, while the default Magento frontend (Luma) uses PHP and Knockout.js. PWA Studio also uses modern technologies but has a more complex architecture compared to Hyvä.
Performance: Hyvä is designed with performance in mind. It aims to deliver faster page load times and smoother user interactions compared to Luma.
User Experience: Hyvä offers a more modern and intuitive user experience compared to Luma. Its use of modern JavaScript technologies allows for smoother animations, faster interactions, and a more responsive design.
To make it more simple, Hyvä offers a more modern, performant, and customizable frontend solution for Magento.
What are the benefits of using Hyvä for a Magento store compared to Luma?:
The primary benefits of using Hyvä for a Magento store, particularly focusing on performance and user experience include:
Faster Page Load Times: Hyvä’s architecture is optimized for speed. By leveraging modern technologies like Alpine.js, TailwindCSS, and GraphQL, Hyvä’s page loading speed is significantly faster compared to traditional Magento frontend themes.
Improved User Experience: With Hyvä, users experience a smoother and more interactive browsing experience. The use of Alpine.js and TailwindCSS allows for dynamic content loading, seamless transitions between pages, and a more responsive interface, enhancing overall usability of sites using Hyvä.
Enhanced Mobile Responsiveness: Mobile responsiveness is crucial in today’s eCommerce landscape. Once again, by using TailwindCSS, it is designed with mobile-first principles in mind, ensuring that your Magento store looks and performs well across a wide range of devices, leading to better engagement and conversion rates among mobile users.
Out-of-the-Box Features: Hyvä comes with several out-of-the-box features aimed at improving the frontend experience, such as lazy loading, image optimization, and enhanced mobile responsiveness.
These performance enhancements can also impact your business’ search rankings, helping you rank higher in search results. Let’s take a look at that next.
What are the SEO advantages of using Hyvä, and how does it help in achieving better search engine rankings compared to other Magento frontend solutions?:
Improved Page Load Speed: Since page speed is a significant ranking factor for search engines like Google, faster-loading pages can lead to higher search engine rankings and better visibility in search results. Like we have mentioned previously, Hyvä is designed to deliver faster page load times compared to traditional Magento frontend solutions.
Mobile-Friendly Design: Hyvä follows a mobile-first approach, ensuring that Magento stores are optimized for mobile devices. With mobile-friendliness being a crucial ranking factor, Hyvä helps improve the mobile user experience, potentially leading to higher rankings in mobile search results.
Structured Data Markup: Hyvä allows for easier implementation of structured data markup, such as Schema.org markup, which provides search engines with additional context about the content on the page. By including structured data markup, Hyvä helps search engines better understand and index the content of Magento stores, potentially leading to enhanced search engine visibility and richer search results (such as rich snippets).
Optimized Performance: Hyvä’s optimized performance not only improves user experience but also benefits SEO. Search engines favor websites that offer a seamless and fast user experience, and Hyvä’s performance enhancements contribute to better crawlability and indexation, ultimately leading to improved search engine rankings.
Outside of enhanced performance, your customers can expect a better user experience on your website too!
From a customer’s perspective, what benefits can they expect from a Hyvä-powered Magento store?:
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From a customer’s perspective, what benefits can they expect from a Hyvä-powered Magento store?:
From a customer’s perspective, implementing Hyvä on a Magento store can lead to several tangible benefits that enhance their overall shopping experience:
Faster Page Load Times: Customers can browse through products, view product details, and complete transactions more quickly, leading to a smoother and more efficient shopping experience.
Improved Mobile Responsiveness: Customers can easily access and navigate the store from their smartphones or tablets, enjoying a seamless shopping experience regardless of the device they’re using.
Smoother User Interactions: Hyvä leverages modern technologies like AlpineJs and TailwindCSS to create dynamic and interactive user interfaces, which results in smoother transitions between pages, faster product search and filtering, and seamless interactions with elements like dropdown menus, sliders, and product carousels. Needless to say, this enhances the overall usability of the store.
Enhanced Visual Experience: Through features like lazy loading, image optimization, and responsive design, customers can enjoy high-quality product images, rich multimedia content, and immersive visual storytelling, making the shopping experience more enjoyable and memorable.
Consistent Performance Across Devices: Whether customers are shopping on a desktop computer, laptop, smartphone, or tablet, they can expect a consistent and optimized experience tailored to their device, ensuring maximum accessibility and usability.
While there are numerous business benefits to using Hyvä, the dev team working on a Hyvä project can also see some benefits too! Here’s how Hyvä impacts the overall development process.
How does Hyvä impact the development process for Magento stores?
Third-Party Extensions: Creating compatibility modules for installed extensions can be complex, especially when there is a lot of JavaScript code involved. However, the Hyvä theme has a lot of Magento community support, and many third-party vendors (like Amasty) are developing compatibility modules for their extensions.
GraphQL: Hyvä leverages GraphQL for data fetching, enabling more efficient and flexible data retrieval compared to the traditional REST APIs. Developers must understand GraphQL concepts such as queries, mutations, and schema definitions to work with Hyvä effectively.
Alpine.js: Developers need to familiarize themselves with the concepts and syntax of Alpine.js, including directives, data binding, event handling, conditionals, loops, and transitions. Understanding how to use Alpine.js is essential for leveraging its full potential within Hyvä.
Modern JavaScript: Since Hyvä relies heavily on JavaScript technologies like Alpine.js, developers should have a strong understanding of modern JavaScript concepts and features, including ES6 syntax, arrow functions, classes, modules, and asynchronous programming (e.g., Promises, async/await).
Tailwind CSS: Developers need to learn the utility classes and conventions provided by Tailwind CSS for styling HTML elements. This includes understanding how to apply classes for typography, colors, spacing, layout, responsiveness, and more. Having the knowledge of the Tailwind CSS configuration, customizations, and plugins can also be valuable for tailoring the framework to more-specific project requirements.
Responsive Design: Since both Alpine.js and Tailwind CSS promote responsive web design principles, developers should also understand how to create layouts and components that adapt seamlessly to different screen sizes and devices. This includes using responsive utility classes, breakpoints, media queries, and viewport units to optimize the user experience across desktop, tablet, and mobile devices.
Magento Integration: While Hyvä focuses primarily on the frontend, developers may still need to interact with Magento’s backend infrastructure for certain tasks such as data fetching, state management, and integration with backend services. Familiarity with Magento’s API and backend architecture is helpful in these scenarios.
Now that we’ve gone through the development piece, let’s take a look at the last portion; customization, and extensions.
How does Hyvä handle customizations and extensibility?:
Hyvä offers a flexible approach to customization and extensibility, allowing developers to fully customize Magento stores to meet specific business requirements. Hyvä also integrates seamlessly with third-party extensions and custom functionalities. Here’s how Hyvä handles customization and extensibility:
Third-party extensions: Many vendors are developing the compatibility modules for their extensions. But custom and non-compatible extensions will need a compatibility module developed to work properly with Hyvä.
Custom Theme Development: Hyvä allows developers to create custom themes from scratch or extend existing themes to match the branding and design requirements of Magento stores. Developers can leverage Hyvä’s theming system to override default styles, templates, and layouts, enabling seamless customization of the frontend appearance and behavior.
Is Hyvä a must for business on Magento?
Given all of the above, we do feel like Hyvä has a ton of benefits for business on Magento, and is absolutely worth considering. As per usual, it depends on your business, and the budget you have in place for development work. If you’re not sure where to start, we recommend having a site audit completed to see how your site is performing before making the switch.
One of our current clients, New Leaf Publishing Group, just made the switch to Hyvä, and are already seeing the performance benefits mentioned above.