If your ecommerce website does not perform well in the eyes of Google and doesn’t meet your customers expectations, you will be losing 7% on your conversion rates for every one second that your website loads slower than the expected load time. Site performance directly impacts your businesses revenue.
Google knows this as well which is why it is launching it’s ‘Core Web Vitals‘ initiative to give you the tools that you need to ensure that your website is performing well enough. In the very near future Google will include these metrics as a more prominent ranking factor meaning that if your site doesn’t perform, then you will inherit SEO penalties. It’s extremely important, now more than ever, to ensure your site performance is on point.
This blog post will provide ecommerce retailers with an overview of ‘Core Web Vitals’ and how you can prepare your Magento 2 site for this update.
Why is your Magento 2 frontend performance so poor?
The out of the box Magento frontend framework, or Luma stack as it’s otherwise known, is flawed by design. It delivers large packets of javascript to the browser and this ultimately impacts the performance of your website in a very negative way. Google hates seeing this which is why optimising your Magento 2 frontend built on the core Luma stack is like pushing a boulder up a hill. Not fun at all!
There are ways in which you can optimise your Magento 2 frontend by merging CSS and JS files, bundling them together and sitting your site behind a CDN such as Cloud Flare, but you are optimising a website that is built on a framework that is destined to fail in terms of performance in the future.
Let’s check out the core web vitals readings that you get out of the box with the Magento 2 luma stack:
Mobile:
Desktop:
These numbers are ok but once we install of our required extensions that include even more javascript and CSS on the pages of our website, these numbers will soon come down further. Not good for business!
How the hell do we get Magento 2 to perform then??
How can we get your Magento 2 website performing at light speed for your customers? The answer to that question is Hyvä Themes. Hyvä Themes is a completely new frontend framework that has been rebuilt from the ground up for performance. The inventor, Willem Wigman, invented the framework because he was tired of trying to push that boulder up hill and get his clients websites performing well in the eyes of Google. The primary focus of Hyvä Themes is performance and we believe it to be an absolute game changer in the Magento universe!
Out of the box Hyvä Themes will provide you with a frontend that search engines like Google love and will pass all of Google’s core web vitals out of the box. The only way you can fail these metrics is by self harming meaning you are the only thing that can destroy your websites performance. You have complete control! Want to implement a live chat widget? Sure no problem but know that this will impact your websites performance and this should be considered when implementing any new features on your site.
Let’s check out some of the core web vitals scores for a fresh instance of Magento v2.4 with a Hyvä Themes frontend;
Mobile:
Desktop:
This is where we want to be! Out of the box Hyvä Themes gives you the performance that your website needs. Yes we have a similar problem with Luma whereby if we add in extensions, that could bring these numbers down but because of the way Hyvä Themes is built, these extensions must be converted to work with the existing framework and it’s libraries which means that we are not adding any additional code to the page.
The beauty of Hyvä Themes
So why is Hyvä Themes so quick compared to the Luma stack? In short, it uses only two libraries to provide everything you need to build your store front. Those libraries are Tailwind CSS and Alpine JS. Both of these are a developers dream to work with and will speed up development time which will ultimately save you a bundle of cash in development costs. Hyvä Themes makes happy developers, happy project managers and happy merchants. Everyone’s a winner when using Hyvä Themes.
Our Director Ryan Copeland presented our thoughts on Hyvä Themes at the first ever Hyvä Themes meetup back in May. His presentation and case study were very well received:
Here at Foundation Commerce we see Hyvä Themes as being the future for Magento 2 frontend. Ryan summed it up brilliantly during his presentation;
“Hyvä Themes is the frontend that Magento 2 should have always had!”
So in short why should you look to rebuild your Magento 2 frontend?
- Your websites performance is linked directly to your revenue – The Luma stack is flawed by design and getting it to perform as fast as you need it to will cost you a fortune with no guarantees. Hyvä Themes will give you the performance that you and your customers expect from your website and for probably not much more than what it would cost you to optimise your existing Luma stack.
- Increase conversion rates – With your website performing at light speed you will see an increase in your websites conversion rates.
- Save money on all your future development costs – because Hyvä Themes simplifies things for developers meaning they can develop new features a lot faster than they could before with the Luma stack.
Foundation Commerce Case Study – KES Lighting
We recently went through the process of rebuilding the frontend of one of our clients websites using the Hyvä Themes framework and the results were staggering.
- 52% decrease in page load speed
- 40% increase in website revenue
- 23% increase in the number of transactions
- 12.7% Increase in conversion rates
They are already reaping the rewards from switching to Hyvä Themes and you can too!
Final Word / Get in touch discuss your Magento 2 project
There are so many benefits of using Hyvä as your new Magento 2 front-end, and they certainly outweigh any of the drawbacks. Not only will it save you time and money developing your new front-end, it also makes it a lot easier to achieve excellent website performance, leading to improved customer satisfaction and piece of mind that your SEO won’t be impacted due to poor performance.
If ever there was a time to optimise the performance of your website, that time is now and we can be there to assist you every step of the way.
If you need help and advice about improving your ecommerce website’s performance, reach out to Foundation Commerce today. We can work with you to get the most out of your existing Magento 2 website. Or if Hyvä Themes sounds like something you want to explore, we are an official Hyvä Themes provider and can set you on on your journey to super fast website performance. Contact us here, or email [email protected] to arrange a chat about how we can help you achieve this.
