The e-commerce platform Magento impresses with many strengths, such as the flexibility for customizations and the multistore functionality for international online stores. Unfortunately, the front end of Magento was not one of the strengths of the system before the creation of Hyvä Themes. Neither the traditional frontend Luma, nor the modern PWA approach are free of problems.
Disadvantages of the Luma frontend
Magento 2's own frontend, Luma, was already considered outdated when it was released. To support dynamic components, Magento introduced UI Components in the checkout and admin area, which allow handling many individual components and extensions. The problem: UI Components are very complex, which creates an enormous amount of extra work even for experienced developers. The biggest problem is the amount of JavaScript code, which causes long loading times and can only be optimized with a lot of effort.
Disadvantages of PWA
PWA combine the advantages of native apps with a website. But PWA also suffer from large amounts of JavaScript code. Our experience has shown that PWA only provide a stable basis if you either stay close to the standard of the respective PWA solution and are satisfied with the limited feature set or provide an extensive budget for custom feature development. In addition, the development effort for PWA is very high, as it is not a solely frontend web development, but also requires extensive backend development skills.
Hyvä as the best solution
For these reasons, neither Luma nor PWA technologies were a satisfactory solution for us. Small and medium-sized merchants in particular are left behind by the high costs of these options, which was not acceptable to us.
Our goal is to offer the most cost-effective and efficient solution for our customers. The result of this? Hyvä!