If you have been googling new themes for your store launch or redesign, it’s very likely you heard about Hyvä. Everyone seems to be excited about it, and you might wonder if this is all hype and salesmanship, or if Hyvä is the real deal.
You are in the right place!
What is Hyvä?
Hyvä is a front-end template developed with speed and simplicity in mind. Compared to Luma and Venia (the Magento/Adobe Commerce native templates), Hyvä is faster. Like Magento Blank, Hyvä can be used as a backbone for custom templates. Yet, Hyvä is not based on Magento Blank like most of the other templates out there. Hyvä is an original build from the ground up.
Importantly, Hyvä is not a headless PWA front-end. The creators of Hyvä wanted a light, fast and elegant PHP solution and they don’t believe that Javascript-only is necessarily the silver bullet to all e-commerce needs.
Is Hyvä good?
As much as Pixie Media does not get specialise in just one specific template technology, and we are always open to discussing your requirements with you… yes, our take is that Hyvä is excellent.
Our developers find it simple to work with and well documented. Third party audit tools like Google Lighthouse score it very favourably, and the speed of the websites that use Hyva are demonstrably higher, regardless of KPIs or metrics.
Advantages
- The choice of opting for PHP is important from a technical and a business point of view. PHP is the bread and butter of web developers, which means that there is plenty of talent that can work on your template. This has positive implications in terms of quality of work, as well as time to market and costs of your new front-end.
- One of the issues with any bespoke front end is the compatibility with third party modules. As the Magento / Adobe Commerce community is agreeing on the quality of Hyvä, third party developers are making sure that their modules are compatible with Hyvä. This is the official list of compatible modules and we can see that it is very active.
- Hyvä is becoming very popular, as shown by the popular technology tracker Built With
Popularity is important as it indicates that the developers won’t disappear anytime soon.
Disadvantages
- Hyvä can be seen as a bit expensive, especially when compared with other free or almost-free templates. This might be particularly true for clients with a limited budget. Yet, we believe that the simplicity of Hyvä allows merchants to write off the template costs by reducing the development time and cost.
- Some specific modules might not be available for Hyvä. It’s worth noting that nothing is impossible. It’s very likely that, whatever the module, it can be made to work with Hyvä. Yet, this is a case where costs might balloon.
Bonus: What does Hyvä mean, and do you pronounce it?
Hyvä is Finnish, and in English it means “good”. If your Finnish is rusty, you can hear how to pronounce it here: https://forvo.com/word/hyvä
In conclusion
Pixie Media is not platform agnostic (we know and love all things Magento/Adobe Commerce), but we are template agnostic.
If you are an existing Magento / Adobe Commerce merchant and performance is pushing you to reconsider your front-end technology, or if you are planning a new store, it’s definitely worth looking at Hyvä. The amount of customization you will need will determine the costs of your design, but it’s very likely that if you chose Hyvä you will see a huge performance improvement, a great user experience, and a boost in sales.
As an agency, we are investing in converting all of our well-loved proprietary Pixie modules to be compatible with Hyva and are actively working on 3 Hyva projects which we look forward to sharing with you soon.