Ultimate Guide On Hyvä Themes – For Online Merchants

As a good story is incomplete without its characters, similarly, your online eCommerce shop front is incomplete without a fast-performing and easy-to-use theme.

To fill this gap we recommend Hyvä themes: lighting fast, highly integrated, easy-to-operate website themes.

eCommerce is a booming industry. Especially with the pandemic-induced digitalization, almost every business is now working on building its own eCommerce page.

When businesses ask an eCommerce development company to build them a website, the efficiency and performance all come down to the platform on which they construct the website. By far, Magento eCommerce has been one of the widely used platforms for that purpose.

They use inbuilt themes to create and deploy a website. However, recent developments have led to a new and improved Hyvä theme developed by Hyvä.

In this blog, we will explain to you all the basics you need to understand when it comes to Hyvä themes. Also, be sure to check out our verdict on whether hiring a Hyva theme development service is really worth the hype.

Understanding of Magento and Luma Before Moving On To Hyvä Themes

Magento is a platform dedicated to designing web pages for your online store in the most optimized way. It facilitates programmers to create eCommerce websites in a short period of time.

With Magento, a programmer does not have to build every code from scratch. Instead, they already have a base on top of which the website gets built.

Since it is an open-source platform, it gained huge popularity among developers. Even popular companies like Nike and Samsung started their online store by using this platform.

There are many other similar platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce. However, there are some ways in which this particular platform stands out from the rest.

1. It’s open-source:

This means anyone can customize it. Customization further leads to improved scalability and flexibility. Assume that you own a business and want to start an eCommerce website for your brand.

You’ll need it to look different from your competitors. Hence, you need the platform to be highly customizable.

2. It doesn’t force you to choose a hosting service:

Many similar platforms only offer a very small list of hosting providers that you can choose from to host your website.

It’s not the case when it comes to Magento. You have the freedom to choose any hosting service you want.

3. It facilitates multi-platform integration:

If you need your customers to trust your eCommerce website, you need to provide them with several payment options. Third-party integration is what comes in handy right about now.

It lets you use the features of a third-party add-on to make it easy for the customer. You can readily install several web plugins and enhance the functionality of your online store.

4. It’s SEO friendly:

When developing a website, it is vital for you to optimize it. Optimizing it makes your website more visible and preferably rank better in the search engine results.

Magento gives you the best URL structure, keywords, meta tags, etc., to move your website up in the search results.

The Drawbacks

The only drawback of using Magento is the default frontend, Luma. The rollout of Magento 2 has only highlighted the flaws in Luma.

The thriving developer community has identified the various ways in which it lacks as a theme. Let us list them for you:

1. Very less speed:

The speed of a website is crucial to the brand’s growth. Customers have tonnes of other options to choose from, if not your website.

This is why many developers are pointing out that using Luma-based themes directly affects the speed of the website.

Mainly due to the use of outdated technologies like RequireJS, KnockoutJS, and Bootstrap. This makes the base code bulkier and thus needs heavy optimizations.

2. Not very mobile-friendly:

Magento 2’s default theme is nothing close to mobile-friendly. Due to the irremovable, unwanted codes in the architecture, the websites created using this aren’t any smoother on smaller devices.

3. So many dead codes:

Creating a website that doesn’t function as it should is a huge loss for your business. And developers are pointing out that there are so many dead codes in the architecture. Which makes certain functions of an eCommerce website unavailable for use by the customers.

4. Costs more than it should:

With it being open-source, you’d expect your development costs to go down. However, as there are tonnes of things that your developers need to optimize, it naturally takes a higher development time. Hence, the cost of making an eCommerce website soars. Read out how you can make your Magento store more profitable.

Hyvä Themes Development – The ultimate Frontend for Magento 2

To overcome all these issues in Luma, the creators have given Hyvä a fresh start by removing outdated technologies like RequiredJS, KnockoutJS, and bootstrap from the frontend architecture.

Instead, it runs on more advanced and relatively new technology stacks like Tailwind CSS and Alpine.js. Tailwind CSS is an advanced framework that manages to reduce the unwanted bulkiness you can see in traditional CSS. Similarly, Alpine.js combines the functions of several JavaScript files in a single framework.

These two are the only things that are fundamental for Hyvä. You can customize all the other components of a website. Thus, programmers can now create well-responsive eCommerce websites with a very lean structure.

The Core Principles of Hyvä Themes

We can say with confidence that Hyvä themes religiously follow all of these core principles:

1. Lesser complexity:

The main aim of Hyvä is to retain the functionalities while offering a simple structure. And with the ability to reset the native templates, you can be assured that there is much lesser complexity while building an online store.

2. Better Performance:

The websites created using Hyvä are significantly faster than the ones created using Luma. Thus, we can say that Hyvä heavily focuses on improving the speed of a website.

Many online shoppers do not like a laggy website. Hence, this principle is truly beneficial for online store owners.

3. Easy for the developers:

Hyvä Themes is built not only focusing on improving the customer experience of online stores but also on helping the developers.

The more simplified and lag-free UI lets you create and develop without any hindrance. Also, the learning curve for developers is quite minimal.

The creators of Hyvä made it so that it is easy to adapt. The Tailwind CSS and Alpine.js are the only things you need to get used to.

Other than that, your developers do not need any special training to operate the new theme builder.

And so far, Hyvä seems to adhere to all these core principles. Every review from the developer community has pointed towards it being a faster and more reliable frontend.

Why should you choose Hyvä Themes?

We can answer this simply by saying that it is the best alternative for you if you want to keep working with your Magento platform.

Other platforms mean that you have to train your employees for it and even recruit new ones to do the job more efficiently. Let us take a look at some of the benefits of the Hyva theme and why you should choose it:

1. The performance

Like we had mentioned several times, the performance of Hyvä themes is way superior to Luma-based themes.

According to several tests, the Luma-based websites take more time to fully load all the elements and functions.

Whereas, Hyvä themes are faster both on desktops and mobile devices.

The primary difference between Luma Themed websites and Hyvä themed websites is their Time to Interactive (TTI) metric.

Hyvä themes give users the ability to interact with all the website functions in less than 2 seconds. While it takes almost half a minute for most Luma websites to become interactive.

2. Maintenance

Many people think that having the default theme is the best way to avoid future maintenance. But, in this case, replacing your default theme with Hyvä means you’d be dealing with very little maintenance.

When it comes to Luma, any upgrades made by the Magento 2 platform impact the templates. Whereas, Hyvä removes all the default output.

Thus, any upgrades made by the Magento platform will not directly impact how your templates look on the website.

Another major benefit of using Hyvä is its ability to store HTML, CSS, and JS files in different components.

Thus, you can easily reduce the maintenance time by only selecting the component that needs changing.

3. Simplicity

Time is crucial for a business. Hence, you must be able to deploy your website as soon as possible. Using Hyvä, you can reduce the time taken by the developers to create a fully functioning eCommerce website.

They are far more simple when compared to default Luma-based themes. They have a more complex architecture for every element you see on the website and not intertwined codes that make it tough for the developers.

With Luma themes, any changes you make to one part may impact the other components as well. But, with Hyvä, you can make changes without having to worry about it impacting other parts of the website.

Also, the newer versions Alpine.js and Tailwind CSS are much easier to use than the older frameworks like RequireJS, KnockoutJS, and Bootstrap.

All these efforts to make it simple not only help the developer but also the online store owner. They can start working on their marketing and sales faster than ever and that too on a website that has a faster response.

4. Usability and adaptability

Imagine you already have a Magento 2 site. Now, if you want to replace your existing default theme with Hyvä, you can easily do so.

Without having to do a fresh installation of the platform and rebuild custom functionality all over again.

But, you have to note that Hyvä doesn’t work on Magento 2.3 or lesser.

You need to update to Magento 2.4 or a newer version to access Hyvä seamlessly.

5. Thriving community

Even the best of developers need help with some issues every now and then. For that purpose, Hyvä has an extensive community of developers all across the globe who actively discuss the theme.

Also, the time needed to learn the Hyvä frontend is much lower than the Luma frontend. Making it one of the best and easily adaptable frontends for Magento 2.

6. Suitable for all business sizes

Hyva themes emerge as a powerful solution, that caters to the diverse needs of small, medium, and even enterprise-level businesses.

Pre-built Hyva theme templates offer a user-friendly and cost-effective way for small and medium businesses to launch their online stores with modern designs and functionalities. These ready-made templates are optimized for performance and a smooth customer experience.

On the other side, Enterprise businesses can leverage custom Hyva theme development to create unique online stores that reflect their brand identity and incorporate specific functionalities.

The Difference Between PWAs and Hyvä Themes

Progressive Web Apps are a great way of producing efficient websites. But they suit better for larger budgets.

Also, it takes a longer time to build using PWA than a Magento platform.

However, the traditional Magento platform lacked the performance to create websites using PWAs.

The Hyvä frontend, however, takes a middle ground in these operations by offering the best of both worlds.

They offer you amazing performance whilst also reducing the time needed to build an eCommerce store. So, Hyvä is an option that will prove beneficial to most SMBs with smaller budgets.

Are Hyvä Themes really worth it?

Yes! They absolutely are worth all the money you pay. You need to pay a license fee to use the Hyvä theme.

Whereas, you do not need a license fee for using the default theme that comes with Magento 2. However, when you look a little deeper, you will find that Luma actually costs you more than Hyvä.

While using Hyvä, you only pay the license fee. But to optimize the speed for Luma, your developers need to spend more hours working on removing unnecessary codes.

Which naturally increases their pay. And not to mention, you need to use certain third-party extensions to speed up the performance of the Luma themes.

So, paying a fixed license fee for the Hyvä themes is a much better option than paying all that money to create a slow website.

A solvable downside of using Hyvä Themes

Remember, how we mentioned that Hyvä replaces older tech stacks like RequireJS, KnockoutJS, and Bootstrap with the latest and lightweight Tailwind CSS and Alpine.js?

Unfortunately, almost all third-party extensions for a web store are made up of default Luma-based themes.

This means Hyvä isn’t readily compatible with other third-party add-ons and extensions.

For a third-party extension to work on your website, you need to change the codes to Alpine.js and Tailwind CSS format and make it compatible.

Hence, your developers will be spending some time replacing frontend code written for the extension to function in your online store.

However, the average duration of this operation depends on the type and the number of third-party extensions you are going to use on this website.

But the good news is that many third-party extension vendors started making their extensions compatible with Hyvä as well so most of those will be ready to use for Hyvä based themes in the future.

Check out 11 Best Hyva Compatibility Extension Providers For Magento 2 Stores!

Final Thoughts on Hyvä Themes

Hyvä Themes are here to stay for months or even years to come. This frontend has revolutionized the working of one of the most sought-after eCommerce platforms, Magento 2.

And almost everyone in the industry agrees that Luma is too bloated and slow for creating a well-functioning website.

Now that every business is focusing on its mobile users, it has become more crucial for them to create websites with better and faster performance.

Hence, Hyvä is the only viable option in the market for companies that lack a huge budget and those that already have a Magento eCommerce site. So contact us now to get hyva theme development done for your digital Magento store.