by admin |

• E-commerce
• Magento
• Website development

January 9, 2023

Hyvä vs PWA: What is the Best Choice For You? (it’s probably Hyvä)

Web Applications are one of the loudest trends today. Smooth user experience, better performance, and faster time to market are just a few of its benefits. However, merchants now have a new, probably better, alternative. Hyvä claimed to be a Magento 2 theme alternative by its creators. 

In this article, we’ll compare Hyvä and PWA side by side and their benefits, differences, and key features. We will go through the following points:

         What is PWA and what is Hyvä?

         What are the main Hyvä advantages?

         What are the main PWA advantages?

         Side-by-side comparisons

         What is THE right choice for YOUR business?

        

What is PWA and what is Hyvä?

PWA stands for Progressive Web Application and looks like a normal website in browsers, but transforms into an application on mobile devices. The list of its features is outstanding.

These include high-speed and offline work on all operating systems and platforms when it’s installed as an app. Although it is a relatively new technology, many companies are already using PWAs for their businesses. AliExpress, Jumia, Alibaba, Flip, Cart, Walmart, and many others are already experiencing the benefits.

On the other hand, we have Hyvä, a Magento 2 theme. Its creators describe it as a less complicated and time-saving alternative to traditional Magento 2 themes. The main goal of Hyvä is to solve Magento’s frontend issues that lead to poor performance and also cut down development costs and time to market. Pretty good, huh?

Main Hyvä advantages

•   Reduced complexity. Hyvä is feature-rich and powerful, yet simple.
•   Improved performance. Performance is the main point for which Hyvä is so praised, and it’s the main focus of the theme – to be fast.
•   Better developer experience. Hyvä offers a developer-friendly environment and has a low learning curve for developers. This allows for a faster time to market.
•   Increased development speed. Because Hyvä is easy to use, implementation and customization of Hyvä themes are relatively fast.
•   Reduced dependencies. Hyvä aims to reduce dependencies on third-party libraries.

 

Main PWA advantages

•   App-like experience. In terms of usability, interaction, and navigation, PWAs provide the same user experience as native apps.
•   Reliable and fast loading of web pages. By default, PWAs are more powerful than native apps due to their lean structure.
•   Device independence. PWAs work on any device and any operating system.
•   One code base. There is no need to develop and maintain a regular native mobile app for two different platforms – iOS and Android.
•   PWAs can be developed using Magento PWA Studio, making them more native to Magento thanks to a native web app. Plus, your PWA is compatible with all upcoming Magento 2 versions.

 

Side-by-side comparison

 

Performance wise comparison

The speed of a website is crucial for customers and for a good ranking on Google. According to them, 53% of users leave a website if a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load. A low page speed score will negatively impact your SEO, as Google relies a lot on performance stats when ranking websites. You can read in more detail in another article about the loading speed problems and solutions that Hyvä provides for every Magento 2 store.

Hyvä focuses on high performance and considers it as its main advantage. The improved performance is achieved by relying only on 2 simple frameworks. As a result, all pages load much faster and allow for a smooth experience even on devices with low internet speeds.

PWAs can also gloat about high performance for several reasons. The first reason is that PWAs use the browser’s cache. Therefore, you can prioritize the resources to be rendered before they are used.

PWAs also allow more flexible caching of your files on client devices through programmable caching. This means that unique caching requests can be easily managed. PWAs also use Service Workers which improves the overall user experience and increase page performance by performing a range of functions and providing offline access.

So, in conclusion, PWA is fast, but Hyvä will be faster if developed correctly. And if you want just that, we will be more than happy to help your business so reach us now!

Functionality wise comparison

In terms of functionality, Hyvä is quite simple but certainly effective. Willem Wigman, the founder, developed Hyvä to open an online store for his wife. She specialized in jewelry collections with not too many products. So his goal was to create something extremely simple yet user-friendly, and he succeeded.

The tendency towards minimalism and reduction of complexity became one of Hyvä ‘s core principles. But Hyvä can work perfectly for early-stage eCommerce companies and small local stores, but also for medium-sized businesses.

PWAs are capable of handling also functionality without lacking website performance (if developed and configured properly). Some of the other PWA features include:

– Offline mode, so customers can browse product catalogs even with a poor Internet connection

– Add-to-home-screen functionality that allows users to install and easily access the PWA

– Push notifications to reach out and engage with customers

Numerous studies confirm that consumers prefer apps over responsive websites. From this perspective, the app-like functionality of PWAs is better because it allows e-commerce businesses to reach this type of audience. 

Scalability wise comparison

The market for Magento PWA-compatible extensions has been actively growing since extension providers like Amasty started releasing PWA-compatible extensions.

Hyvä does not work with third-party extensions that come out of the box. To customize your store, Hyvä provides the Hyvä Themes compatibility library to make the most commonly used extensions compatible. If you want to customize your Magento 2 store, don’t hesitate to contact us right away or first learn more about us here!

 

What is THE right choice for YOUR business?

With the various front-end solutions available for Magento 2 stores, merchants have the option to choose what best fits their project. However, as these options vary widely, this decision should be the result of careful consideration to ensure the best investment of the project budget.

For too long, the Magento ecosystem has suffered from inadequate front-end solutions that have exhausted agencies and burned merchants’ budgets on front-end solutions that never delivered the expected return on investment.

Hyvä as a unique answer?

We are certainly a bit biased towards Hyvä because we are a partner and contributor for Hyvä. For us, here at Younify, Hyvä was the brightest star in the sky when other front-end solutions failed. But especially in the early days of Hyvä, we also experienced the downsides, such as when third-party extensions were incompatible. As days past, the Hyvä community grows and the potential drawbacks – lack of compatibility with third-party extensions – become fewer.

Still, for certain projects, a PWA’s front-end might be the better approach – especially if there is a lot of budgets available.