Hyvä Commerce Success Story: 90% Faster Page Loads for a Top UK Retailer

Speed is no longer an option in today’s fast-paced eCommerce landscape; it’s a business imperative.

The speed of page loads can literally make or break a customer’s success or failure and will determine the level of engagement, conversion, and brand health.

For another high-performing UK retailer, sluggish performance was not just a technical disappointment; it was a growth dampener.

Stale bounce rates, diminished conversion, and deteriorating Core Web Vitals metrics were eating into visibility and revenue.

This case study examines how the retailer used Hyvä Commerce to boost their loading speed boost and score on all devices, by turning their Magento store into an optimised digital experience.

The Challenge: Breaking Through Performance Bottlenecks

Prior to moving to Hyvä Commerce, the retailer was plagued by a series of frontend limitations that most Magento store owners will be familiar with.

Dreadful Load Times

Their previous Luma-based frontend was chock-full of duplicate JavaScript, CSS, and heavy dependencies that slowed loads.

Horrid Mobile User Experience

As mobile traffic grew, the store loaded in over seven seconds on handheld devices, far beyond Google’s suggested cutoff, and produced subpar mobile conversions and high bounce rates.

Limited Customisation

Each design modification required expensive frontend revisions, leading to longer development times and increased maintenance expenses.

SEO and Conversion Problems

Slow performance encumbered Core Web Vitals, slowing search rankings and decreasing customer confidence.

Essentially, the outdated frontend stack could no longer keep pace with the retailer’s increasing demand for speed, design flexibility, and scalability.

The Solution: Replatforming with Hyvä Commerce

The tech team at the retailer needed to get rid of these issues, so they replatformed their Magento frontend using Hyvä Commerce, a new-generation platform built for speed, simplicity, and scalability.

As opposed to legacy Magento frontends that depend on RequireJS, KnockoutJS, and LESS, Hyvä use Tailwind CSS and Alpine.js, reducing code bloat dramatically and offering more flexibility.

The transition involved:

• Auditing and removing duplicated scripts and bloated assets from the Luma frontend.
• UI reimplementation with Hyvä Theme to improve performance and usability.
• Image and asset optimisation for mobile and desktop rendering.
• Caching optimisations implemented and inclusion of a global CDN for superfast content delivery.

In the weeks after launch, the difference was evident.

The Results: 90% Smaller Page Loads and Enhanced Core Web Vitals

After migration, the retailer achieved measurable success through key performance indicators:

90% Decrease in Page Load Time

Average load time decreased from 6.8 seconds to as low as 0.7 seconds, an industry-leading reduction that dramatically improved user experience.

Enhanced Core Web Vitals

Due to Hyvä’s lean code architecture, all critical Core Web Vitals measurements, LCP, FID, and CLS, became green, improving search visibility and overall site health.

25% Conversion Boost

Accelerated load speeds and better navigation spurred visitors to browse and buy, resulting in an outstanding conversion uplift in the first month.

70% Mobile Experience Gains

Mobile visitors saw the most gains, with unprecedented speed uplift, lowering bounce rates for driving better engagement.

40% Less Maintenance Effort

Hyvä’s tidy architecture resulted in faster and simpler updates, conserving time and resources on maintenance by almost half.

Why Hyvä Commerce is So Exceptionally Fast

Hyvä’s secret is lean architecture. It peels off unnecessary layers from Magento’s outdated frontend and substitutes them with optimised, robust technologies.

• Lean Framework: Hyvä substitutes bulky Magento themes with lean, optimised components.
• Optimised CSS and JavaScript: Tailwind CSS has only the necessary styles, and Alpine.js reduces heavy scripts.
• Fewer HTTP Requests: Thinner code means fewer server requests, and it becomes faster even on slow networks.
• Cache-Friendly Design: Smooth integration with Redis and Varnish provides fast loading for return visitors.
• Developer Productivity: The streamlined architecture enables developers to build scalable, performance-oriented pages in fewer lines of code.

SEO and User Experience Impact

The changes weren’t technical alone; they transformed business results.

Boosted Google Rankings

Improved Core Web Vitals resulted in better search positions and visibility, driving greater organic traffic within weeks of launch.

Increased Engagement and Retention

Quick page loads and convenient surfing led to higher on-site stay time, keeping users for repeat buys and more.

Improved Conversion Path

From discovery to checkout, all interactions were optimised for speed and seamless experience, diminishing cart abandonment and overall conversions.

Business Results Long-Term

The upgrade to Hyvä Commerce positioned the retailer for sustained growth. The store can now handle high-traffic events like seasonal sales comfortably without sacrificing speed or stability.

The design team of the brand has more independence to create good-looking, responsive designs according to the appearance and look and feel of the company, as well as what people like.

Ongoing feedback from the Hyvä community keeps the technology future-proof, up-to-date, and compatible with future Magento releases.

This change, through Silhouette Europe’s success story, illustrates how performance focus can be translated into technical as well as business innovation.

Key Takeaways

The Hyvä Commerce overhaul was a gold standard of digital transformation for this UK retailer.

By eliminating the inefficiencies present in the legacy frontend and embracing Hyvä’s lean architecture, the store realised a 90% enhancement in faster load times, Core Web Vitals, and conversions by 25%.

The maintenance time dropped by 40%, freeing up resources to be made available for innovation and marketing.

The success story, echoing Silhouette Europe’s victory, demonstrates that performance optimisation is not merely a tech improvement; it’s a business growth tactic.

With Hyvä Commerce, the retailer built a strong foundation for scalability, improved SEO, and higher customer satisfaction, setting a high benchmark for what a Magento store can do. Connect with our Hyvä experts to know more about it’s benefits and implementation process.