Has the Hyvä theme killed the Luma theme for good?
Adobe Commerce / Magento Open Source has a variety of themes to help merchants create online stores. Two of the most popular themes for Adobe Commerce / Magento Open Source are the Luma theme and the Hyvä theme (pronounced ‘hoo-va’).
Both of these themes are designed to offer a great user experience and help businesses increase sales, however, the new Hyvä theme has some key advantages that will give brands a competitive edge.
In this article, we’ll take a brief look at the difference between Luma and Hyvä, then take a deep dive into why you should migrate your Magento frontend onto Hyvä if you want to gain the edge over your ecommerce competitors.
Luma Theme: the details
Luma theme is the default theme that comes with Adobe Commerce / Magento Open Source. It is a simple, modern theme that offers a clean, minimalist design.
Luma theme is easy to customise, making it a good option for small businesses or merchants who don’t want to invest a lot of time and revenue into their first e-commerce website.
One of the main advantages of the Luma theme is that it comes out of the box in Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce.
However, there are limitations. It doesn’t offer a lot of advanced features, and its design can be somewhat basic and feels a bit “off the shelf”.
Additionally, the Luma theme can be slow to load. This can negatively impact user experience and search engine optimisation, which is reflected in poor Core Web Vitals scores. Though ecommerce businesses can work to improve these scores, it can be an uphill battle at times.
Hyvä Theme: the details
Hyvä is the new theme for Adobe Commerce / Magento Open Source that was released in 2020. It was conceived by Willem Wigman (founder) and his brilliant technical team.
Hyvä is a premium theme that offers a variety of advanced features and a sleek, modern, crisp design. It has been designed to provide a fast, responsive experience for users, making it a good option for businesses that want to prioritise user experience and SEO.
One of the main advantages of the Hyvä theme is that it offers a lot out of the box. It has a variety of advanced features that can help merchants increase sales and improve their online store’s functionality.
Why You Should Move to Hyvä
1. Speed is Everything
Multiple studies have shown that users are more likely to abandon a website if it takes more than three seconds to load. Search engines also prioritise fast-loading websites in search results.
Hyvä theme is designed to load rapidly, which is a key factor in user experience and SEO.
In Hyvä’s own words:
“Hyvä themes is a sane alternative for headless/PWA solutions, using the PHP-templating system that is built into Magento. Because we’ve rebuilt the entire frontend from the ground up, we were able to keep it really simple.
A standard Magento theme loads over 200 JS/CSS resources (1,5 megabytes), Hyvä loads only 2 JS/CSS resources (0,2 megabytes)!
Less code means less complexity, making it a lot easier and more fun to work with. We’ve kept the bits developers love (layout.xml, blocks, viewModels) and removed everything they… disliked. Bye bye RequireJS, Knockout, UIComponents!”
If you’re wondering how fast Hyvä can be, our latest project for Wolvende loads in 0.77 seconds!
2. Hassle-free Checkout
In today’s e-commerce market, you have to be the quickest and provide a smooth hassle-free checkout process.
While Shopify has really nailed the hassle-free checkout, the speed of the platform is questionable.
Meanwhile, we believe that Hyvä has plugged all the gaps in Adobe Commerce / Magento Open Source when it comes to speed and fluidity of checkout.
3. Improved Core Web Vitals
Many brands benchmark their ecommerce site’s performance against Core Web Vitals. Hyvä theme has vastly improved Core Web Vitals score by dramatically reducing the amount of code that is loaded when a shopper arrives on the website.
Hyvä says:
“Out of the box, Hyvä scores a 100/100* score in Google PageSpeed and it passes Core Web Vitals on all metrics.
What was impossible to achieve with Luma, and incredibly hard to achieve with PWA’s (or better, Single Page Applications), becomes commodity with Hyvä. You’ll need to make sure you keep performance high, which requires some effort, but with Hyvä perfect scores are possible.
Better performance means better user experience, higher conversion rates and higher SEO rankings.”
*Whilst Hyvä does score an amazing 100/100 out of the box, you need to remember that the more features you add, the more performance tweaks you need to make.
4. Development Community
Where Hyvä stands out from a development perspective is the community aspect of Hyvä, which ultimately is better for our clients and helps speed up the development process.
Hyvä has a huge community of developers from different agencies across the world who are proactive, helpful and willing to share code in order to push the Hyvä theme for more businesses to adapt to it.
5. Integration with Sensei
Hyvä theme is in the closing stages of complete integration with Adobe Sensei for search and product recommendations. Again, something Adobe has not managed to complete for their PWA offering as of yet.
The proof
We’ve recently converted Wolvende from Shopify to Magento using the Hyvä theme. The results are clear to see when it comes to Core Web Vitals as well as conversion rate improvements:
Before:
After:
Take a look at the Hyvä demo store here.
Let’s start your Hyvä project
Fluid Commerce currently has Hyvä conversion projects in progress for some of our clients. We’re excited to share them soon!
If you’re thinking your Adobe Commerce / Magento Open Source website needs a speed improvement, please drop us a message and we’ll be more than happy to discuss Hyvä with you.
