Back in 2015, Magento 2 arrived on the market, succeeding Magento 1 after 7 years of loyal service. Packed with new technology, it was a breath of fresh air in the world of e-commerce that would consolidate Magento's strong market position and popularity.
The gap between the release of Magento 2 and today is now greater than that between the first and second iterations of Magento. It's clear that Luma, the default theme, has outlived its usefulness and no longer meets the expectations of the Web in 2024.
So what's to be done? Optimize, as best we can, a theme with technologies that are not obsolete? Or look to the future? That's the question behind the creation of Hyvä, a new theme for Magento 2, which fully replaces Luma, using today's latest technologies. But migrating your site to a new theme can be costly, scary or simply unconvincing in its innovations and promises. Here are 8 reasons why you should take the plunge!
1. Hyvä's Community
The Hyvä theme was created by several big names in the Magento community, including Willem Wigman, who has over 10 years' experience in Magento, having worked at integer_net and Vinai Kopp, a major contributor to Magento, particularly Mage-OS, Magento U trainer and MageTV speaker.
Such a strong core allows us to have a very active community around Hyvä, constantly offering new compatibilities, features and debugging for a project that is still relatively new, yet so stable and powerful, compatible with Magento Community and Adobe Commerce.
Developers working on the development of a site using Hyvä have privileged access to the community's Slack, as well as to a GitLab account where module compatibilities are made available, in addition to being able to contribute directly to Hyvä's code. On Slack, there's a wealth of front-end, back-end and even DevOps developers ready to help each other out, answer questions or offer feedback on the product code.
In addition to the open source community contribution, the major Magento extension publishers, such as Amasty, MageMe and JaJuMa, have understood that there is a very clear and sustainable future for Hyvä. They now offer native compatibility with Hyvä. Blackbird is also making its extensions compatible, including Advanced Mega Menu Manager and Advanced Content Manager!
2. At the cutting-edge of technology
The main objective of the Hyvä theme is to facilitate front-end development for Magento. This is why they have opted to do without RequireJS and rely on Alpine.js, a popular library in the Laravel community. To make things even simpler, Hyvä integrates Tailwind CSS, which not only accelerates development, but also optimizes the weight of generated styles, thus having a positive impact on customer navigation and SEO.
With one release per month on average over the year 2023, the Hyvä team continues to propose ongoing improvements to its product, while ensuring strong compatibility between new releases and previous versions. Upgrades are also simplified by the use of upgrade scripts, which allow you to update smoothly and without risk.
From new features and fixes to upgrades of various dependencies, frequent releases allow you to take advantage of improvements to Hyvä's two main libraries, Alpine.js and Tailwind CSS. This means that teams can write modern, high-quality code throughout the life of the site, and limit the technical debt that can become an obstacle on more traditional Magento themes.
3. A ready-to-use boilerplate for smaller projects …
Hyvä is the perfect solution for simple stores, as the native theme is already very complete, modern and high-performance. All Magento Open Source functionalities are in fact turnkey. Its rapid installation makes it the perfect tool for immediate project start-up.
The use of Tailwind CSS also allows strong customization of the native theme without having to go through the entire code base again. In fact, by simply redefining the theme's colors, container size or different screen sizes, you can customize the frontend in no time for projects that emphasize simplicity.
4. … And highly modular for larger ones
Hyvä makes life easier for us on projects requiring more customization or specific development for custom features. The change of technical stack from Knockout / RequireJS to Alpine.js is a real game-changer. Gone are the dozens of JavaScript files loaded in sometimes uncertain order, Alpine.js is a unique dependency and allows us to write clean, modern and maintainable code.
In the same spirit, the use of Tailwind CSS facilitates integrations and ensures greater uniformity of practices for the teams involved throughout the life of the project. This further enhances maintainability, while saving a considerable amount of time during the integration phase, further breaking with Magento's native Luma theme.
The Hyvä team has also thought of e-merchants who wish to cohabit websites with Luma and Hyvä themes on the same Magento instance. In fact, it's very easy to configure a Hyvä theme to ensure that no impact is made on another site in the instance, since instructions specific to Hyvä can only be interpreted by Magento if the theme is activated on the site visited. We can therefore envisage smooth migrations on our Magento stores.
5. Hyvä UI, component library
Available since July 2023 to all Hyvä licensees, the Hyvä UI library is packed with ready-to-use components to help developers, merchants and agencies integrate online stores quickly and easily.
These components are among the most popular in the world of e-commerce: header and footer, desktop and mobile menus, notification bar, hero banner, reassurance, content blocks... The choice is endless, making it easy and efficient to customize your store.
A component isn't exactly to your taste? They're easy for developers to customize, and adapt natively to your site's color palette thanks to TailwindCSS.
No need to install, maintain or look for modules to bring your site to life: these components can be retrieved from a single module maintained on GitLab by Hyvä and the community, and integrated into your site in three clicks!
6. Unrivaled performances
One of the real challenges facing online stores today, and the web in general, is performance. Users don't have time, they don't want to wait. This also impacts the degree of trust placed in a website: if it takes more than a handful of seconds to load, it's already too late, something's "wrong".
No need to worry! With the technologies used by Hyvä Themes, the dubious performance of Adobe Commerce's native theme ‘Luma’ is eclipsed. Using a streamlined composite class system, TailwindCSS delivers a site's style at a lower cost; while AlpineJS replaces the sturdy but aging jQuery to give user interaction a modern, lively edge.
These are major changes for the structuring of a Magento theme: it's the core elements that are exposed to search engines and the robots that analyze them. Whereas Luma's basic theme offered Lighthouse performance of around 40/100 on a product page, Hyvä easily achieves 99/100!
Such high performance is also made possible by a modern glyph system: HeroIcons (by the founders of TailwindCSS), which takes full advantage of the functionalities offered by SVGs, right within Magento. Customization is simple, and replacing or adding new icons is fluid and fast.
7. Putting SEO first
For many, SEO is unfortunately overshadowed. Lacking intuitiveness, interest or understanding of the issues at stake, it's easy to miss out on one of the fundamental building blocks of today's Web. Hyvä is constantly striving to make life easier for those who place their trust in them, which is why the theme is geared towards integration that meets all the main criteria for SEO in e-commerce.
The native scores are 100/100, and it's important to point this out, because in a context of tough competition, it's vital to be correctly referenced by search engines if you want your business to grow.
Until recently, SEO was often seen as just a handful of keywords, or titles, forming a score. Recently, the challenges of inclusivity have turned this vision on its head, with an emphasis on accessibility. That's why, since August 2023, Hyvä Themes natively meets the WCAG standard at AA level, to provide a complete technical response to the challenges of e-commerce.
8. Multiple checkout as options
Checkout is a crucial step, so it's important to choose the right solution to offer the best customer experience. The Hyvä team is fully aware of this, and offers several approaches to address the issue.
The first is a fallback functionality that allows the Luma checkout to cohabit with the Hyvä theme. With this option, the checkout is that of the native Magento, and installed modules or developments already carried out on this part are preserved.
While this may be the preferred option when migrating an existing site to a Hyvä theme, you won't benefit from Hyvä's own technologies to customize the checkout afterwards. Another point to consider is that the performance of the Luma checkout may be below that of other available options, which can be a considerable hindrance to conversion.
The React Checkout option is also available. This solution is of real interest to development teams with React JS experience, making it easier for them to customize the user experience. With React's popularity, this too is a relevant option to ensure that the checkout can evolve on an ongoing basis.
Finally, Hyvä offers a 100% homemade checkout: Hyvä Checkout. This is a separate product that should be included outside the cost of the initial theme license. Here we find all the advantages of the Hyvä theme for front-end development (AlpineJs and Tailwind) coupled with the power of Magewire, a system inspired by the Laravel community's Livewire.
In simple terms, this makes it possible to customize the checkout and its interactions using PHP code, enabling Magento teams to deliver and design these interactions more seamlessly. In this way, an even higher degree of personalization can be achieved with less dependence on external modules, while improving client-side performance.
To conclude
Eight reasons are not enough to describe the scale of the technological revolution that Hyvä represents in the Magento ecosystem. It's the high-performance, turnkey, innovative answer to providing our customers with stores that best meet the needs of their leads.
In addition to raising awareness of accessibility, SEO and good development practices, its community is one of the most active, particularly in terms of mutual support and relevant players. To try it is to adopt it!
Need to see it to believe it? Here are two of our Hyvä references: Bultex and Maison Kitsuné.
