Pros and Cons of the Hyvä Theme for Magento 2

What is Hyvä Theme?

Hyvä” is Finnish for “Good., but in technical terms-is a brand new, lightweight frontend for Magento 2 meant for fixing all the performance issues of the existing Magento frontend themes like those of Luma. It is a simple, easy-to-use theme, perfect for any website or project that needs a modern look while also focusing on providing a great developer and user experience. The Hyvä theme allows you to develop a store with limitless potential, magnificent store aesthetics, and eye-catching designs to bring your business notion to life. The seamless integration of user-friendly navigation and cutting-edge technology offered by Hyvä delivers an eCommerce store with a solid coding architecture. The search engine friendliness features and performance optimization will allow your website to thrive in the modern digital landscape.

The benefits of the Hyvä theme are manifold and can improve both the appearance and usability of your eCommerce store.

Pros of Using Hyvä Theme?

Here are some of the main benefits that developers and eCommerce store owners can experience by using the Hyvä theme:

1. Speed and Performance Optimization

The number of visitors and conversions of any eCommerce store will depend on its speed and performance. Even a one-second delay in performance can result in a loss of a thousand dollars. Hyvä reduces the loading time and meets the latest Core web Vitals KPIS.

The faster your customers can navigate through your store, the more visitors, conversions, and sales you will experience. A laggy or slow Magento theme can negatively impact your site performance and cause users to shift to alternative brands. Google and other search engines love fast and high-performance websites and give higher rankings. This theme will speed up transactions and optimize the website by providing valuable insights.

2. Customization Options

When selecting a front end for your eCommerce store, pay attention to customizability and flexibility, as your store’s scalability will depend on these. Hyvä theme comes with a modern framework that provides a unique feel and design to your website, delivers a user-friendly customer experience, and ensures unlimited customization.

Developers have the flexibility to choose design elements, fonts, and colors that align with the brand identity to create an impact on the users. It also allows businesses to customize logos, menus, and other vital website aspects. This will ensure that the navigation menus of your store are easy to use and tailored to your unique content structure.

Also, Hyvä allows you to integrate a variety of plugins and third-party extensions seamlessly. Businesses can extend their website functionality by integrating additional tools and features such as:

• Payment Gateways
• Social Networking feeds
• Email marketing integrations, etc.

Another robust feature of the Hyvä theme is its drag-and-drop layout builder. This user-friendly Hyvä tool allows businesses to create bespoke website layouts even without possessing technical expertise or coding knowledge.

3. Mobile Responsiveness

The Hyvä theme prioritizes mobile responsiveness to ensure a seamless user experience and cater to a wide audience base. With Hyvä’s mobile responsiveness feature, eCommerce stores can experience the following benefits:

Positive User Experience: Hyvä’s mobile responsive design delivers a user-friendly, optimal user experience by improving content readability and store navigation.

Wider Audience Reach: Hyvä allows your store to run on all devices, including tablets and smartphones, ensuring users from all sectors to access your store.

Higher Conversion Rate: Hyvä delivers streamlined mobile experiences with optimized checkout processes and simplified forms to generate higher conversion rates.

4. SEO-Friendly Design

The Hyvä theme is popular with developers owing to its SEO-friendliness and alignment with the best practices of search engine optimization. Here are some of the benefits of the SEO-friendly features of Hyvä:

Readability: The content of your website should be easy to read and clear to optimize it for SEO purposes. The Hyvä theme enhances content readability and presents it in a legible and user-friendly manner. This keeps your visitors engaged and ensures a positive user experience, which then influences your SEO rankings.

Multiple Device Compatibility: The Hyvä theme is compatible with multiple devices, including smartphones, PCs, and tablets. This compatibility will allow your store to work consistently on different platforms, which sends positive signals to Google and other search engines.

Fast Loading Times: The Hyvä theme prioritizes fast loading times, which further impacts your SEO. Search engines consider page speed as an important ranking factor. Fast-loading pages will enhance your user experience and allow you to pop up at the top of search engines when users search using targeted keywords.

5. User Experience Enhancements

A positive user experience improves customer satisfaction, garners positive reviews, and ensures repeat business. If your website fails to enhance user experience, it may harm the reputation of the brand and deter customers. The Hyvä theme offers a contemporary, sleek style that is straightforward and aesthetically pleasing.

The Hyvä theme offers a configurable product grid that allows businesses to categorize their goods and services in a user-friendly way.

The Hyvä theme also comes with a social network integration that allows users to share their product information and purchases on social media. You will also find a customizable mega menu that allows users to quickly access the categories or goods that they are highly interested in.

6. Developer-Friendly

Hyvä is considered developer-friendly due to factors such as:

Familiar Structure: The Hyvä theme has a similar structure to Magento which simplifies the customization process by allowing developers to use their existing skills and knowledge.

Supportive Community: The Hyvä theme has an active and robust community of Magento developers who collaborate to share solutions for challenges and custom functionalities. It is a valuable resource for interested developers who are looking for innovative solutions to the challenges faced during their project delivery.

Streamlined Dependencies: The Hyvä theme comes with a curated set of dependencies that improve overall website performance and development efficiency. These carefully curated dependencies streamline customization and the development process, resulting in faster project delivery.

Cons of Using Hyvä Theme?

Hyvä themes can rapidly customize your Magento eCommerce store, but you may face some challenges as well:

1. Learning Curve

Compared to traditional Magento themes, the Hyvä theme leverages a modern methodology and architecture. If you are familiar with the native theming system of Magento, you may need to adjust to the new concepts and structure because of its unique learning curve.

2. Compatibility Issues

Hyvä themes face extension compatibility issues. There are over 200 extensions that are compatible with Hyvä, but for the ones that are not on the list, you have to pay additional fees.

Hyvä’s compatibility with extensions can be categorized into three parts:

• Compatible with extra compatibility modules: These modules replace incompatible aspects of the original module and usually involve rewritten PHTML templates or JS scripts.
• Incompatible: These are modules that fail to align with the framework of the Hyvä theme.
• Natively compatible: These modules do not have front-end components.

3. Checkout

At present, Hyvä themes are not available in the new Magento checkout. However, two alternative checkout solutions are in development. One of them is a ReactJS-based checkout, and the other one is a custom-built Magewire checkout. They are presently in their early stage and have huge potential as alternative checkout solutions for Magento 2 websites.

4. Cost Considerations

Even though a huge community backs the product sharing code of Hyvä themes, it is not fully open source yet. The license cost of the Hyvä theme is €1000, which is a one-time fee and allows you to run multiple eCommerce stores on Magento 2. If you’re looking for something basic, consider the license fee (1000 euros) + development cost as your overall cost. However, the development cost may vary if you need more features and customization options.

5. Ongoing Maintenance

Maintaining and upgrading an eCommerce store to Magento’s future version using the Hyvä theme may be challenging and time-consuming. This is because as Magento develops and integrates new features, Hyvä developers can face functionality and compatibility issues of the Hyvä themes with the Magento platform.

Conclusion

Hyvä theme stands up to its reputation of being an easy-to-use and fast Magento theme with unparalleled customization possibilities. If you are dealing with a laggy website or experiencing performance issues, Hyvä can be a good solution for these concerns. However, integrating a Hyvä theme in website or store development can be costly for small businesses. Also, the learning curve is different, making it essential for developers to get trained before working as a Hyvä developer. If you want to hire Hyvä developers, remember to check their project portfolio to understand their proficiency in delivering high-quality projects. Also, check their certification and ensure that they can face the challenges associated with Hyvä theme development.