Choosing the front end for your Magento or Adobe Commerce store is a crucial decision. It will affect both the overall development costs and the sales you'll make in the future. After all, the front end plays a crucial role in shaping the shopping experience for your customers. There are plenty of options available on the market, but one stands out - Hyvä Theme. In this article, I'll dive deep into why I, as a Front-End Developer, believe Hyvä is likely your best business choice.
Are there any other Magento Themes?
By default, Magento comes with two themes—Blank and Luma. Since these themes were created, front-end technology has truly evolved, and their codebase has become outdated and overly complex. On top of that, their page speed performance notoriously causes many issues requiring time and resources to fix. This is a difficult task and the results can be disappointing. Since most themes available on the market are based on these themes, so they will also inherit the same problems.
Snowdog's experience in theme development
For years, we were developing our very own, open-source theme—Alpaca. Our goal was to be able to deliver quality and feature-rich e-commerce stores for our clients faster. We've used it in a couple of dozen stores. Alpaca offers a lot of improvements, most notably to design, accessibility and developer experience. However, the performance aspect became a constant struggle over time. We did a lot of research and a substantial amount of work to improve it, but we still weren’t satisfied with the scores we were getting in Google PageSpeed.
We had ideas for further improving our theme, but it was a huge task and at some point, it became apparent that we'll be better off leveraging what the Hyvä team had already created. Furthermore, rather than providing our own theme open source, we could contribute to the Magento community by actively contributing to Hyvä's product development and improvement.
What about PWA?
In recent years, Progressive Web App (PWA) solutions have gained significant popularity for Magento and Adobe Commerce platforms. Options like Magento PWA Studio, Vue Storefront, and Scandi PWA have driven this trend.
Standard Magento relies on traditional web technologies, utilizing a PHP framework that combines the back end and front end into one. In contrast, PWA solutions take a different approach, leaning heavily on JavaScript to create a more mobile app-like experience. While PWAs have their benefits, it's essential to consider the costs. On average, these solutions take more development time, resulting in higher costs and slower delivery.
For sure, there are cases where a business could benefit from choosing PWA. However, I don't believe PWAs should be the default solution for Magento. As you'll soon discover, Hyvä is a compelling alternative that brings valuable advantages to the table.
What is Hyvä Theme?
Hyvä offers a brand-new front end for Magento. Released in 2020, it keeps the Magento framework with its core concepts, while fixing an outdated, overly-complex, low-performant front end. Hyvä's primary offering is a front-end theme, but it encompasses much more than that. It serves as a toolset, an extension ecosystem, and a supportive community. You can take a look at Hyvä's Demo here.
Key Advantages of the Hyvä Theme
Hyvä's Performance
I've already mentioned performance a couple of times. Why is it so important? It has a significant effect on sales:
- Performant e-commerces get more traffic - Google favors websites with fast-loading speed.
- Performance affects your bounce rate - Customers tend to abandon slow-loading sites. A high bounce rate tells Google that users don't find the page's content helpful and decreases its rankings.
Hyvä was built with performance in mind. By default, Hyvä scores around 100/100 score in Google PageSpeed and passes Core Web Vitals on all metrics. This is a spectacular result for an e-commerce site.
Reduced code complexity
Hyvä removed all third-party libraries that you can find in Magento. There's no JQuery, RequireJS and Knockout.js—the source of most pain for front-end developers. Hyvä leverages a lot of the browser's native features. For example for form validation and data fetching. On top of that, it uses Alpine.js. You can think of it as a modern jQuery. It's simple and lightweight.
By default, Magento uses Less CSS for styling. Hyvä takes advantage of Tailwind CSS, the most downloaded CSS framework currently on the market. When you start using Tailwind, it's hard to go back to writing CSS in the old ways. It makes the work faster and more pleasurable. Moreover, Tailwind CSS is a great option from a performance perspective. It produces a very small CSS file for production.
Both Alpine.js and Tailwind CSS are used inside PHTML templates, encapsulating templates, related logic and styles inside one file. It makes it easier to locate code related to a particular component and make changes.
Large community of contributors
Hyvä has taken the Magento community by storm. It has many partners and contributors that help further improve its product and ecosystem. Snowdog is one of the partner agencies. Our focus is improving Hyvä's accessibility and aligning it with WCAG guidelines. Our work will guarantee that out of the box Hyvä caters to the needs of all customers. Ensuring your e-commerce store is accessible not only improves customer experience and satisfaction but also it's required by law in many countries. If you'd like to learn more about the topic, you can check our page about accessibility or this blog post by our Accessibility Team.
Increased speed of development
This is a result of the advantages already mentioned above:
- Reduced complexity makes it easier to implement changes in code and add new features.
- Use the community - You can take advantage of the work done by others. For example, if you require new functionality, there's a chance there's already a Magento module for that. Out of the box, modules don't work with Hyvä but thanks to the large community, it's possible that someone already created a compatibility module for it.
Design
Hyvä has just released Hyvä UI. It's a set of components based on a proper design system. It can help deliver a nice-looking website in less time. The designs are available in Figma. This is great because designers can use them as a starting point and customize them to fit your brand's needs. Which makes the whole process much faster.
Brand-new checkout
Magento checkout is arguably the biggest nightmare for Magento developers. It's difficult to customize and slow. The good news is that the Hyvä team has taken on the challenge of creating a new checkout. Similarly to the theme, its key advantage is performance and reduced complexity. You can read more about it here - Magewire - A game-changer for Magento backend devs.
Future-proof
When you choose a third-party solution, there’s always a chance it will stop being maintained in the future. What stands in favor of Hyvä is that it's a commercial product, not a free open-source theme. The Hyvä team promises continuous development and offers long-term support.
Another aspect you should consider is how difficult it is to onboard new people to work on your store. For developers with experience in Magento, Hyvä has a low entry threshold thanks to its simplicity. It's also worth noting how popular Hyvä has become. There are already over 1500 live stores using Hyvä and the number is expected to grow. At Snowdog we have a few Hyvä stores already in development.
Conclusion
Hyvä shines in terms of performance. It can also reduce the time to market and overall costs. Is it the right choice for your e-commerce store? At Snowdog, we carefully assess each e-commerce situation to advise a tailored solution that suits your specific business needs. Contact us, and we'll see how we can best help your business!
