Implementing Hyvä

Platform: Hyvä + Magento 2
Industry: Homeware

Hyvä migration to better performance

  • Technical consultation

  • Systems integration

  • Ongoing maintenance

  • Site monitoring

Tech:

The Story So Far

A long-standing Magento 2 client of ours, within the homeware industry, had been using a solution called ScandiWeb PWA (the first open-source PWA theme for Magento) for front-end development for the last two years, but adding features or conducting updates was proving time consuming and expensive, even for basic tasks.

The Challenge

Continuing with ScandiWeb PWA was clearly unsustainable. Having two separate systems to support meant that ongoing development tasks were taking longer and costing more than they would by using Magento alone; and when it came to upgrading their Magento version to keep their site secure and compliant, it became quickly apparent to us that the PWA would need to be substantially refactored too.

For their growing business, our client needed a fast, high functioning site that was easier and more cost efficient to maintain. Our solution was to migrate them to Hyvä; a high performing Magento theme that rivals headless and PWA solutions for speed but keeps both front- and back-end in the same family for ease-of-use and ongoing development efficiency.

Unified Approach

We were excited to get started on our first Hyvä project, particularly because we were already familiar with its tech stack from developing our custom-built Shopify Origin theme.

Hyvä is a simpler tech stack, more in line with a traditional Magento 2 build, and offers fantastic performance. It also has stable updates and in the rare case of breaking changes (changes to code that have a knock-on effect for other areas of the site), they are well documented and often come with patches to assist in updates. With the client on board and excited about the potential improvements, we went to work swapping ScandiWeb PWA for Hyvä.

For the CSS and UI elements, we used Tailwind, a CSS framework that’s a dream to work with and offers increased performance and project longevity in equal measure. It can also be used to create components at a modular level, meaning they can be reused throughout the project, and even on other projects.

The JavaScript library we used is called Alpine - this powerful front end library is a bit like jQuery for the modern web, but is small, lightweight and reactive. The rest of the framework is now made up of all of the best bits of the Magento system - everything that was weighing the site down previously has been stripped out. Including LESS, RequireJS, Knockout and UIComponents. Finally, we added a few quality-of-life improvements, like add to basket from the PLP, and made some bug fixes.

Reduced Speed Index Score
Reduced Time to Interaction
Reduced Time to LCP

By replacing the front end with Hyvä, we’ve moved the client from a headless tech stack back to a monolithic tech stack. This is a less common approach, but performance has improved hugely without compromising on developer experience. Most importantly, the client was delighted with the results of their new, super speedy Magento site!

Our client expressed that "working with Unified on the Hyvä migration was a seamless and stress-free process and the benefits were there to see from day one. It’s been an absolute pleasure from beginning to end."

Account Manager at Unified

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