Hyvä - Online store can not be faster

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.

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.

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.

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.