by admin |

• E-commerce
• Hyvä Theme
• Magento

March 30, 2023

Discover the Benefits of Our Hyvä Essentials Package Theme: A Custom Magento Theme for Enhanced User Experience and Shop Delivery Time

Younify’s first contact with the Hyvä theme was around 2 years ago when we created a task for our Senior Frontend Developer to investigate Hyvä.

After a bit of testing and implementing, we were pleasantly surprised at how good the Hyvä theme is and all the benefits it can bring to the customers.

Really, love at first sight?

Yup, and here is how it happened. At that time, we had one new project for which we were entering the build phase, and we decided to assign two teams, one team working on Luma base custom design and another team working on Hyvä based custom design. We mainly wanted to compare the development process and the final result.

We were shocked at the results; not only that we finish the Hyvä-based custom design sooner, but it was also performing a lot better than the Luma based. The pages were loading much faster; the page speed score was so much better that you couldn’t compare them to Luma scores. The only downside we saw then was that the extensions were incompatible with Hyvä, so we had to write our compatibility modules. Even with that, the Hyvä team finished before the Luma team.

The rest is history…

After our first Hyvä shop went live, we went to a few of our big clients with Luma-based custom designs to show them Hyvä and see their reaction. It was undeniable that they were shocked at how well Hyvä was performing, but it was hard to make them transition to Hyvä since that would mean a significant investment on their part. Because essentially, we would have to rebuild their shop from scratch, but at the time, they were happy with their shop. The investment didn’t make sense to them, especially with the limitations of the extension’s compatibility.

Everything is going good, but not great…

After that initial feedback, we realized we needed something to shorten that development time further and add more improvements to our client’s shops so that we could “make” them transition to Hyvä because of all the benefits. And this is when the idea of “Hyvä Essentials” was born.

Together with our team leaders, we identified a few steps in our build process that we should try to improve:

•  Faster Typography page
•  Identify the most commonly used extensions by our customers and make them compatible
•  Make the CMS Pages easier to maintain for clients
•  Improve the base Hyvä theme layout to accommodate the requests from Marketing Companies

While building our Hyvä-based custom theme, one of our bigger clients decided to restructure the whole shop. We then saw that this was the perfect time to suggest Hyvä to them, which they accepted. This was our first major project on which we could test the “Hyvä Essentials” pack theme and improve it even further.

By the way…

Here is the list of extensions and features that the Hyvä Essentials pack theme has and why Hyvä Essentials theme is a pack in the first place:

• Amasty FAQ
• Amasty Brand
• MGS StoreLocator
• Ajax Add to Cart
• Custom product labels
• Additional category SEO description/text
• Custom Product page template tailored according to the latest standards
• MegaMenu extension

We are very close to great!

While working on this project, we realized that even though the Hyvä theme is well made and optimized for speed, if you don’t follow a few rules, it’s easy to make it very complicated and break some optimizations. And it’s not just about the client content changes but also about developers. We identified these weak points and adjusted the Hyvä Essentials pack theme. For example, we noticed that when using the Magento Page Builder, it is easy for our clients to change the Home Page so that the Page Speed Score drops drastically (from mobile 95 scores to 70+ scores). Our solution was to create our module that will extend and optimize Magento Page Builder and add premade Magento Page Builder Templates. This has a huge impact and improvement on performance maintenance. Looking from the customer side, they could create/change CSM Pages a lot faster, and the benefit is that the page will automatically get a 90+ Page Speed Score. Isn’t that just perfect in every single way?

This was a big eye-opener for us!

We realized that it is not only crucial for the Hyvä Essentials Pack theme to have a faster development time or new design based on the latest marketing agency requests but that we also need to have systems in place that will ensure that the Page Speed Score stays above 90+ without having to optimize pages for hours.

Of course, everything out of the box has limitations; you cannot always predict what a customer will do in his shop or the following requests. Even with all the optimizations he added and optimizations that Hyvä developers are constantly doing, we see that our clients or external partners are making changes that will drop the score. However, considering that the score can now be fixed within 30 minutes up to 2 hours, it is still the best solution to use the Hyvä theme.

We have succeeded, and now…

After almost 2 years of working with Hyvä and with over 11 Hyvä shops built, with over 20 compatibility modules created, we are happy to say that using Hyvä Essentials Pack, we can develop a small Hyvä shop in less than 1 month. And depending on the client’s ability to be involved in the project, the Hyvä shops can even go Live in around 1 and a half months. This doesn’t mean that all shops can be done in this amount of time; it depends on the shop’s complexity and clients’ requirements.

Conclusion

To summarize, why did we make Hyvä Essentials, and why do we keep maintaining it:

•  The theme build time is shortened by around 170 hours
•  Hyvä Essentials has built-in support for several major extensions
•  Layouts have been adjusted to accommodate the latest Marketing company’s requests
•  Additional optimizations in place which will ensure that content changes don’t have a significant impact on the Page Speed score
•  Over 30 prebuilt CMS Pages templates to choose from
•  Ability to see your shop on Hyvä in less than 2 weeks with your shop’s styles (current styles or new styles)
•  An agile approach to your theme development, the theme is built in phases where you can work with our designer and developer to adjust page designs while the build phase is in progress
•  Your shop will go live with a Page Speed Score of 90+ (but our goal is 95+) on Mobile

So, yeah… Ultimately, our Hyvä Essentials theme is a powerful and flexible theme that will help merchants get their shop faster, tailor-made just for their needs, and always with lightning-fast performance. But also, at the same time, it makes a lot easier life for developers. Don’t hesitate to contact us and take your Magento store to the next level!