A good Hyvä Developer: a little checklist

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First of all – great to know you have decided to join the Hyvä Hype :-). It’s a true game changer in the Magento eco-system.

Moving your e-shop to an Hyvä frontend is the right decision if you appreciate up-to-date technologies and want your Magento webshop to be blazing fast. With Hyvä you will have a faster and better performing webshop that offers better user experience. This can result in higher conversion rate’s, higher average order value and better SEO/SEA performance. In addition the maintenance is easier, resulting in lower on-going development costs.

If you are interested to learn what the ROI could be for you, please feel free to reach out to us.

Now you “just” need to find a good agency or developer who can turn your slow Magento 2 webshop into a fast one using Hyvä.

Due to the popularity of Hyvä it’s tempting for agencies or developers to say they can do it. This article might help you put them to the test. We are not saying that if not all the checkboxes are ticked you shouldn’t move forward. Just be careful then. Make sure the contract and timelines are realistic and that your are not paying (the full 100%) for the learning curve into Hyvä.

I estimate that the first Hyvä shop we built took about 2-3x more hours as we need now (after 6 implementations). In addition an agency will have to make sure that all their (frontend) developers go through this learning process.

In this article we will therefore bring out a checklist that helps you to select the right development company. You don’t have to be technical to go through our tips. No way some technical buzzwords can make you hesitate now if it’s the good way to go 🙂 . Sometimes I feel the Magento techies rule the world and forget about the benefits which the e-commerce merchant needs.

So here we go!

Check if the company is listed on the Hyvä suppliers list

The people behind Hyvä truly care about quality and their solution. They run good checks and being listed means the agency or freelancer listed there has earned his listing.

Check if the company has a Silver or Gold star – this means they are Hyvä contributors or partners

You can read about the difference between a Gold or Silver star here. Younify has a Silver star, mostly due to our contributions in making extensions compatible with Hyvä and of course the cool shops we built. Here is one example: Maxifleur

Ask for Hyvä references delivered by the agency or freelancer

Which webshops did they already build on Hyvä? Take some good time to check them. Does it come close to what you are looking for for your shop?

Also very important to ask: are the e-shop references provided in the same budget bandwidth you are looking at? You get what you pay for.

Ask them about compatibility modules. The developers should be familiar with the concept and able to make compatibility module if needed

Your current Magento 2 webshop might be using several frontend extensions which are important to you. These extensions need to be (made) compatible with Hyvä. Is the agency or developer familiar with this process. How many and which extensions did they make compatible?

How long will it take to develop the Hyvä theme?

Normally the development should be faster then developing on the standard Magento Luma theme. On the other end, the agency or developer could be super busy now. If I sign today, when will we be live approximately? At Younify our delivery time right now is approximately between 3-4 months for a new Hyvä frontend.

How long have they been working with Hyvä?

When did their developers start working with Hyvä for the first time?

  • Was it over a year ago? Nice, they have been at it for a while and your project is definitely not their try-out 🙂
  • Was it over 6 months ago? Good, they have by now covered the basics. Make sure however the developers working on your project are the same ones who started 6 months ago.
  • Was it less than 6 months ago? It’s good they are also convinced Hyvä is the way to go, but be careful. Make sure your contract is aligned with the risk of the little experience they have. Make sure you don’t pay for the full learning curve and be ready to accept some project delays.

Check if the agency or feelancer is an active member of the Hyvä community

Hyvä minded developers find each other on Gitlab and Slack. They share their experience and code improvements and learn from each other. Being an active participant shows the commitment to deliver quality solutions.

Ask if the agency has a plan for performance optimization which is considered and implemented during development

One of the main reasons you want to move to Hyvä is to get a better performance. However Hyvä can not solve everything. Before going live also other performance parameters should be checked and optimized: external scripts (such as Hotjar etc) and poor hosting, can still have you end-up with less than expected performance.

Does the agency have procedures / programs in place to monitor performance over time?

So your Hyvä webshop went live. Blazing fast with beautiful Google pagespeed scores 🙂

Webshop performance is an on-going process: a new module, an error in your Google tag manager or simply uploading “bad” content can ruin these scores easily. You need to agree with your developer on how to monitor and correct any performance issues down the road.

Ask how many developers are experienced with Hyvä

Our experience is that in order to offer a certain service in a stable way you need to have enough resources. The difference between 1 or 2 vs 3 – 5 developers is huge if you look at planning. Vacation, pregnancy, attrition … they are part of every day life and if the company only has a couple of developers specialized in Hyvä the project is at risk.

Verify with the agency that the developer that is working on your project personally has Hyvä experience, not just the agency itself

This one pretty much speaks for itself, but do the check. The success is so much dependent on the developer who is working on your project. Ask who will work on your project. Are they experienced with Hyvä? Which projects did they build? And how long have they been working with Magento in general.

Check the performance score of the references they provided

There are several tools available to check the performance of a Magento store. One of them is https://pagespeed.web.dev/. A score above 90 is great. Check out here what is the safest way to get that 90+ score.

Make sure to not only test the homepage, but also check a category and product page.

This was the checklist that gives you confidence before choosing your partner. If you’re not convinced with the option you have and are looking for developers that meet all these requirements, we’d be happy to help you, too. We at Younify have been working with Hyvä since early versions and were among the first to adopt it – so you can be sure the task will be handled by professionals. Just reach out to us and let’s make it happen!

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