Hyvä Themes Makes Magento Friendly for SME E-Commerce

If you’re running a small or medium-sized eCommerce business (SME), then Hyvä Themes is the perfect solution for you. Hyvä Themes makes Magento 2 more user-friendly, without the unnecessary complexity associated with the out-of-the-box LUMA frontend stack.

With Hyvä Themes, you’ll enjoy faster site loading speeds, and improve site performance with a simple front based on a light stack that goes along with Google UX metrics.

Hyvä Magento 2 Themes as a game changer

You will support your online store with better mobile device compatibility, and reduced development costs of Magento commerce.

All of these lower the entering costs and makes Hyvä Magento Themes an ideal solution for all-size business as the Magento ecosystem is a great eCommerce platform when you plan to grow your business and scale the online store up.

Let’s have a look at the details from a small and medium business perspective.

The challenges faced by SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) when it comes to e-commerce

The eCommerce market is very competitive with many online stores, and multichannel businesses operating in both digital and brick-and-mortar stores. In 2022 global eCommerce sales are expected to reach more than 5 trillion USD with 27% of the global population shopping online.

E-commerce is based on more and more sophisticated technology that big online stores can afford. And complex technical solutions allow them to take advantage over small and medium ones by offering an excellent customer experience.

The main SME e-commerce challenges are as follows:

• Manage every activity within the organisation with limited resources, both human and financial.
• High Technology and development costs. How do develop an efficient eCommerce website with limited technical expertise in the in-house team?
• Access to reliable technical support for complex e-commerce technology, lack of in-house knowledge in the highly advanced e-commerce environment.
• Site Visibility and SEO effectiveness, getting found by potential customers in the vast ocean of e-commerce sites in the situation of immense competition.
• Customers’ growing Expectations and retention. The customer journey is getting more and more demanding, expecting great user experience (UX) personalisation, together with lower prices.
• The Agility challenge is to be able to quickly adapt the business to market changes, as the e-commerce landscape is continuously changing.
• Being Consistent with the omnichannel strategy, offering a seamless customer experience on every digital and physical touchpoint with the brand.
• Data Security, and customer trust. ECommerce clients are getting more sensitive to sharing personal data when shopping online.
• Cyber-security risks at eCommerce businesses with a growing number of cyber-attacks.

All these challenges require wise and effective means of action supporting the online store in every stage of growth. It’s reasonable to arrange them from the very beginning with a robust, reliable and future-oriented technology stack.

Magento 2 eCommerce platform

Magento 2 is an eCommerce platform developed in PHP. It was created by Varien Inc., a US private company headquartered in Culver City, California, with assistance from volunteers who became Magento Community and still support the platform.

The first public beta version of Magento was released in 2007. Today, Magento 2 is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms in the world, with more than 160,000 live websites.

Magento and Adobe cooperation

In 2018 Magento was acquired by Adobe and has been supported by its technology. On the other hand, Magento Community is getting stronger and still works on open source version development, while Adobe is moving towards complex services for the biggest corporations under the label of Adobe Commerce. 

Magento Open Source innovations

Magento 2 remains an open source e-commerce platform with vivid and active members of the Magento Community who are the source of technological innovation for Magento and Adobe, which is also profiting from cooperation.

Magento Community is focused on simplifying technology, lowering the entrance barrier by decreasing costs and popularising the Magento eCommerce platform among small and medium entrepreneurs.

Magento advantages

Magento offers a flexible and scalable eCommerce platform with an extensive range of functionality that helps businesses in any industry to succeed.

• Flexible architecture – Magento’s modular code is fully object-oriented, and it follows the MVC (Model View Controller) development pattern.
• Scalability and High Performance – Magento can scale to support large catalogues and high traffic volumes.
• Out-of-the-box functionality – Magento provides a basic set of features that allow businesses to get started immediately without any third-party plugins or add-ons.
• Feature-rich eCommerce platform – Magento provides many advanced features such as customer segmentation, product personalization, and dynamic pricing that are often not included in other eCommerce platforms.
• Extensibility – Magento modules architecture allows businesses to add or replace functionality without re-architecting the entire site.
• Magento 2 is multilingual and multicurrency – supports multiple languages and currencies out of the box.
• Security – Magento’s security features protect businesses from common attacks such as cross-site scripting, SQL injection, and session hijacking.
• Magento is a free-of-charge open-source e-commerce platform. However, the development costs need to be taken into consideration.

Magento’s downside till now was its frontend framework which was created some time ago and now is rather outdated and clumsy. Let’s have a close look at the Magento frontend modules’ evolution.

Luma frontend for Magento 2 store

Luma is a frontend stack and defaults Magento 2 Theme and the fact is it’s being obsolete and sooner or later it will not be supported anymore and become an extinct technology.

Luma’s frontend framework has poor performance, not satisfying in most situations. It forces Magento developers to do hours of extensive work on over-engineered code making their actions complex and time-consuming.

Luma development cost and time-effectiveness

Although Luma is free it requires hours of development that make it less effective not only in e-commerce performance but also in cost fields.

Developers were not satisfied with the work spent on the Luma framework nor with the results. Magento 2 merchants and store owners experienced the platform’s complexity and time-consuming development processes with no satisfying results in site performance.

Luma complexity and code excessivity

Luma as a default theme for Magento has been lambasted for its lack of speed and criticized since Magento 2 launched.

The architecture and bloat of both the CSS files included as well as JavaScript libraries cause pages to take longer for becoming visible or interactive, respectively.

The excessive size can be a reason for Luma’s lack of performance when using these themes.

Cascading Style Sheets and JS libraries

CSS and JavaScript are what gives your site its dynamic, interactive feel. With these tools at hand, you can create all different types of content to enhance the user experience on a website such as menus that open when clicked or an accordion window which reveals itself by scrolling down – there is no end!

The problem is that extensively large Javascript and CSS files take space and time for development and bringing with not satisfying results.

PWA (Progressive Web Apps) as Luma alternative

With the rise of Progressive Web Apps, frontend development has drastically changed. PWA solutions are now available for several e-commerce platforms including Magento 2.

A Progressive Web App is a website that looks and behaves like a mobile app. PWAs use features of mobile devices, without the need for the user to visit an app store, make a purchase and download software.

PWAs’ goal was to create a native-like performance with file size constraints by leveraging modern technologies like HTML5 bundling techniques and persistent storage offline awareness so users don’t need a network connection at all times.

They get content when needed without delay even if there isn’t an internet connection yet unless it’s the first visit to your site – this means anyone can enjoy your application no matter where they are located. It’s useful for mobile device users.

PWA downsides

Progressive Web Apps are complex to implement and the performance results are not always satisfying without a vast amount of work. The fame of this technology is connected to mobile technology popularisation and the necessity to serve the market needs in this field.

Nevertheless, there was still a lot to do to make the technology friendly for the developers and merchants profiting from their work results. And attempts for increasing page speed were still under pressure from demanding customers.

And here Hyvä Themes appeared…

Hyvä Theme for Magento 2

Magento 2 needed a significant quality boost. And Hyvä Themes was the answer to this need. Invented by Willem Wigman in 2021 in one year became very popular thanks to the outstanding quality of this innovative technology.

Hyvä Themes is appreciated by developers and merchants who become familiar with this solution in the last couple of months.

Hyvä Themes technological innovation

Hyvä Themes was considered as a PWA development alternative. They replaced all of the JS libraries with Alpine and used Tailwind CSS to give users an intuitive interface, which is why it’s gaining popularity among businesses that want their websites to perform fast but still look good on any device or browser.

Hyvä Themes game changer

Hyvä Themes come from Magento Association members and prove their great influence on Magento 2 Open Source development. Hyvä gathers a community around the project and makes developers optimistic about the technology’s future.

Hyvä.io‘s goal is to make developers and merchants happy again with the high-quality Magento 2 technology stack with its simplicity, reliability and stability which was declared during the Hyva meetups and proved in real effects.

Hyvä Themes technology stack

Hyvä Themes is a PWA development alternative that replaced all of the default Magento 2 JS libraries with Alpine. They used Tailwind CSS to give users an easy, friendly interface and experience!

And it works! After a year of practising at Panda Group, we can confirm that all successful implementations and client and developers’ experiences show it gives outstanding effects and bring Magento 2 eCommerce platform to a higher level involving also individual customer satisfaction.

Hyvä Themes advantages

Hyvä Themes has a lot of benefits we have already noticed and experienced after a year of working on Magento 2 development with the Hyvä frontend.

Panda Group is Hyva.io official supplier in Poland and we mostly recommend Hyvä Themes because of its’ excellent performance.

Hyvä frontend Performance and Page Speed

At Panda Group we pay attention to the site performance and working with Hyva Themes we have noticed how Hyvä Themes allows optimising easily Magento 2 eCommerce for Core Web Vitals Google metrics.

Hyvä Themes improve SEO and CTR

Lightweight Hyvä Themes’ code enables to speed up the Magento 2 eCommerce sites. Going along with Google metrics focused on User Experience (UX) allows for bringing more traffic on your site.

Clients more and more value page speed and stable content which are also measured by Google to promote in search results the best-performing pages.

Bigger traffic brings higher CTR (Click Through Rate) and in consequence increases the Conversion Rate which meets every store’s business goals.

Time and budget optimisation with Hyvä Themes

Hyvä Themes was done by developers for developers who experienced hard times together with the clients operating with other traditional Magento themes e.g. Luma.

Extensive technology stack with overdeveloped code used to be a serious bottleneck in the development process. With a lightweight and simple Hyvä Themes code, we are able to make development projects three times faster than with Luma which brings real savings in time and budgets for our clients.

Time to market with Hyvä Themes is much more convenient for all sides, the developers and Magento 2 eCommerce owners.

Hyvä is future-oriented and cheaper than outdated technology

Hyvä is certainly modern technology focused on delivering simple solutions and making complex environments clear and simple again. It is future-oriented and cheaper in the long-term perspective than the existing Luma frontend which had no significant updates apart from Page Builder since Magento 2 was created around 10 years ago.

Reduced frontend code will allow the average Magento 2 page to achieve performance not available so far with Luma Theme.

Hyvä Themes adaptability

Hyvä Themes is created to be compatible with Magento 2 Open Source, and native Magento mechanisms. More and more extensions are becoming consistent with this revolutionary solution.

Hyvä Themes compatibility is expanding rapidly as new extensions are added every day. After a year of Hyvä Themes’ existence, there are more than 110 Magento 2 external integrations which fit Hyvä Themes.

Robust Hyvä Community

The community around Hyvä is full of innovative attitudes, enthusiasm and youthfulness. With origins from the Magento Community, this lively bunch have been inventing new eCommerce solutions with game-changing potential for years now!

The group’s aim is to make Hyvä thrive and grow as an eCommerce solution. They want to influence Magento 2 future by working on Hyvä Themes full time and making it the best possible tool for SME e-commerce players. 

How does Hyvä Themes improve Magento 2 performance?

We test new technologies regularly and also we’ve made some research to check the overall impact and game-changing role of Hyvä Themes for Magento 2 position among other e-commerce platforms and Magneto themes.

Luma Themes, Hyvä Temes and other e-commerce platforms in Google metrics

Google Data Studio presents different e-commerce platforms’ performance when it comes to page speed and user experience (UX). Google started to measure and keeps awarding better SERP positions sites delivering the best experiences. 

User Experience (UX) Google metrics

Core Web Vitals (CWV) are part of search signals for page experience and show the site’s responsiveness, stability and speed.

They are represented with the following metrics:

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint),
• FID (First Input Delay),
• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift).

Among pages based on Hyvä technology, 60% of sites have positive Core Web Vitals metrics. This score is soaring above the other e-commerce platforms like Shopify, Wix, Squarespace or WordPress while Magento with Luma theme achieves only 27%.