Hyvä - Online store can not be faster
The new Magento Hyvä theme provides a new basis for creating dynamic, responsive and especially fast online stores with Magento. As a long-standing Magento agency and Adobe Solution Partner, we have taken a look at the current state of implementation and highlight below what works with Hyvä - and what does not.
As of October 2023, over 2,100 shops have already been implemented on Magento with the Hyvä theme.
The Magento shop of Klyd published in April 2023 has a loading time of less than one second on the homepage.
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Fast and Furious: Google's 3 second rule
Back in September 2016, Google highlighted slow website loading times as a conversion killer and an obstacle to online shopping in its blog post "The need for mobile speed", based on analyses of its Google Ads. The study cited highlights the following three core statements as the biggest blockers for conversions:
- 53% of visits are likely to be abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load
- One in two people expect a page to load in less than 2 seconds
- 46% of respondents say that waiting for pages to load bothers them the most when browsing the internet on mobile devices
Faster is better!
For about one to two years, various website and online store operators have perceived the loading times of their websites as a ranking signal for Google. In short, the previous assumption was always that the faster a page loaded, the better it ranked on Google's search results pages.
Until now, however, this was only a "perceived truth", which was even officially relativized by Google in July 2020 through the video "Page Speed: SEO Mythbusting". Until November 2020, the truth was that the loading time of a website is still an important criterion for the user, but does not have a particularly strong impact on the ranking in Google.
in November 2020, Google then published a schedule for the "Web Core Vitals". Google thus grants, from May 2021, the user-friendliness and especially also the loading time of a website a high ranking value.
But why is a faster loading time also better?
Google has established the following key statements by constantly measuring loading times:
- "If the page load time increases from 1 to 3 seconds, the bounce rate increases by 32%". I.e. a website should load within a maximum of 3 seconds, otherwise a third of all users already abort calling up the website.
- "If the page load time increases from 1 to 6 seconds, the bounce rate increases by 106%." That is, if a website loads for more than 6 seconds, more than twice as many users abort calling up the website as before.
Especially in the eCommerce environment, a slower website effectively costs conversions or purchases.
But why is a faster loading time also better?
Google has established the following key statements by constantly measuring the loading times of websites:
- "If the page load time increases from 1 to 3 seconds, the bounce rate increases by 32%". This means that a website should load within a maximum of 3 seconds, otherwise a third of all users will abandon the website.
- "If the page load time increases from 1 to 6 seconds, the bounce rate increases by 106%." This means that if a website takes more than 6 seconds to load, more than twice as many users abandon the website as before.
In the e-commerce environment in particular, a slower website effectively costs conversions or purchases.
Hyvä, Hyvä - The new store benchmark in terms of pagespeed
Although Magento 1 stores used to be considered powerful tools that could be used to meet almost any requirement, Magento never had the reputation of being a system that produced particularly fast online stores. With the change to Magento 2, many developers and online store operators had some hopes for improvements in this area. Unfortunately, these were not confirmed by the Magento standard"Luma Theme" (Link: Magento 2 Demo with Luma Theme).
Magento 2 again wanted to meet all requirements and embedded a large number of JavaScript and corresponding libraries, which inevitably led to slower loading and execution times when calling the online store frontend, the website visible to users. Without much optimization and efforts, a Luma Theme Magento 2 store usually came up with Google Pagespeed scores on mobile devices at 50 out of 100 and on desktop devices at 95 out of 100 maximum points.
Hyvä - A new approach
With the Hyvä theme (Hyvä = the Finnish word for "good"), the complete frontend approach of Magento 2 has been overturned. All JavaScripts were removed and as much as possible modern browsers and the possibilities of modern stylesheets (Tailwind CSS) and very lean JavaScript (AlpineJS) were used. Hyvä was officially published on 12.02.2021 in the context of a release party.
This pays off immediately, already at first installation, without major adjustments clearly. A demo Hyva store thus immediately achieves a mobile score of over 80 points in the Google Pagespeed Check without any effort. On desktop computers, the score is already 98 out of 100 points.
By making an adjustment on the server, we were even able to achieve mobile scores of 98/100 and desktop scores of 100/100 in Google Pagespeed InSights for our Hyva demo store within a few minutes.
What Magento features are supported with Hyvä Theme?
The Hyvä theme is basically applicable for Magento stores from version 2.4. On the very clear feature matrix of the Hyvä theme you can see the current roadmap for the development daily.
In general it can be said that as of 03/2021 almost all Magento Open Source features are already supported, or are already in development for the upcoming version 1.1. All common product types (Simple Products, Configurable Products, Bundle Products, Groupable Products, Virtual Products, Download Products) are supported as well as all related types of cross- or up-selling and linked product types.
Product detail views and category pages, optionally as list or grid view, are also supported out-of-the-box, as well as everything remotely related to products. For example, stockability, zoom images, download sample files or even product reviews are already supported.
The complete customer area including dashboard, shipping and billing address, order status, reorders, wishlist, product reviews and also newsleter are already currently available in Hyvä, as well as an EU-compliant cookie notice.
Magento stores with hyvä theme
With pumpe24.de, web-vision successfully launched the first customer project as an early adopter even before the 1.0 release of the hyvä theme in February 2021.
Below you will find a selection of other pagespeed-optimized Magento stores with hyvä Theme.
What else works with Hyvä?
One of the most interesting features of the current 1.1.2 version of Hyvä are the so-called swatches. With these swatches you can switch texts, colors or images as buttons in Magento Shop. As of 04/2022, the swatches are already fully implemented for the detail pages and thus also available free of charge for all previous licensees.
Furthermore, the language selector, the currency changer and a layout reset theme are already integrated for version 1.1. Of particular interest is the support for the PageBuilder, which makes it possible to create individual landing pages with Magento's own CMS using drag-and-drop.
For version 1.2 of the Hyvä Theme, an improved search including automatic completion and recently viewed or compared articles has been announced.
In addition, the Hyvä Checkout is currently being developed separately as a separate open source project, which is currently nearing completion and supports the main product types and attributes. However, if you wish, you do not necessarily have to use it with Magento, but can continue to use a checkout process of the Luma theme or Firecheckout, for example.
Also as open source software Hyvä Admin is currently being developed, which offers a new possibility to create your own admin grids in the backend of Magento. All existing standard grids and forms in the Magento backend are not overwritten, but are still available. Again, as with the Hyvä theme, the focus is on fast display and execution in the Magento backend.
Hyvä Theme 1.3 adds accessibility features
Version 1.3 of the Hyvä Theme for Magento brings a number of new features and improvements, especially in terms of accessibility and usability. Here are some of the key changes that will help comply with the Accessibility Reinforcement Act announced for June 2025:
Web Accessibility Improvements:
- Introduction of a "skip navigation" link that becomes visible on focus.
- Improvements to keyboard navigation, primarily in the top menu and mobile menu.
- Improved screen reader support, including announcements of focus changes and flash messages.
- Increased color contrasts for better visibility and readability.
- More accessible product review forms and summaries.
Changes to the design and user interface:
- Adjustments to the header, such as improved search function and customer menu.
- Improvements to the display of product galleries and sliders.
- Adjustments to the shopping cart and checkout process for a better user experience.
Technical optimizations:
- Fixing various bugs and issues that occurred in previous versions.
- Improvements in the handling of configuration options and templates.
- Updates in terms of compatibility with Magento modules.
Further customizations:
- Improvements in the use of Tailwind CSS and Alpine.js.
- Adjustments to the documentation and upgrade instructions.
web-vision as official Hyvä Supplier
We at web-vision are simply thrilled with the performance and flexibility of the Hyvä theme. We assume that the implementation speed and the otherwise time-consuming Pagesepeed optimization can be significantly shortened.
As of 01/2022, web-vision alone has seven online stores in development based on Magento 2.4 with Hyvä Theme. Currently, there are far more than 50 Magento stores that already use Hyvä as the basis for their themes. In 12/2021 the Parkettkaiser online store based on Hyvä was launched.