Magento has been one of the most trusted eCommerce platforms for years, largely because of its flexibility, scalability, and full code ownership. It works for stores of every size, from small shops to large enterprise retailers, and has kept adding features as merchant needs have grown more complex.
Despite these strengths, Magento has traditionally struggled with frontend performance. Its default frontend relies on a heavy JavaScript stack, including RequireJS, Knockout.js, jQuery, and LESS. Even merchants who invest heavily in performance optimization often struggle to hit strong Core Web Vitals and PageSpeed scores, simply because of how the default frontend is built.
Hyvä built the Hyvä Theme to replace Magento’s default frontend. Instead of the traditional stack, it uses Tailwind CSS, Alpine.js, and vanilla JavaScript. That lighter architecture cuts frontend complexity, speeds up page loading, and can get merchants to PageSpeed scores of 90+ when it’s implemented correctly.
Today, many Magento merchants are planning to migrate to Hyvä Theme, though they often have questions like:
Is Hyvä only a frontend change?
What benefits will my business actually see?
What does a Hyvä migration involve?
How much time should I plan?
Is migrating to Hyvä really worth the investment?
In this guide, we’ll answer these questions and explain what you can realistically expect as a merchant when migrating your Magento store to Hyvä Theme.
What Changes During a Hyvä Migration?
Hyvä is a completely different frontend theme. During migration, your storefront is rebuilt using Hyvä as the parent theme, while your Magento backend stays untouched.
Since the frontend is rebuilt from scratch, you can keep your existing design or use the migration to redesign your storefront with a better user experience.
Pro Tip: Since your development agency is rebuilding the frontend anyway, this is a good time to refresh your store’s design instead of just recreating the old one. A better design can also lift conversion rates.erience and conversion rates.
What Stays the Same?
One of the biggest concerns merchants have is whether their daily business operations will change.
The good news is that your Magento admin panel remains almost exactly the same. Although Hyvä installs additional modules and configuration options, your core backend areas continue to work as before, including:
Orders
Products
Customers
Marketing
Promotions
Sales reports
Store configuration
Your team can keep using Magento without extra training, so the switch is easier on the operations side.
What Needs to Be Rebuilt?
Because Hyvä uses a completely different frontend architecture, every customer-facing page needs to be rebuilt. This includes pages such as:
Homepage
Category pages
Product pages
CMS pages
Shopping cart
Customer account pages
Hyvä already includes standard eCommerce functionality, so common features such as product listings, product details, add-to-cart, and the shopping cart are available out of the box. However, any custom frontend functionality you built for your store also needs to be rebuilt.
For example, if your product page displays an estimated delivery date based on the customer’s postcode or PIN code, that functionality needs to be redeveloped to work with Hyvä.
If you want to reduce design and development time, consider starting with a premium ready-made Hyvä theme template instead of building every page from scratch.
Haven – Ready-to-use Hyvä Theme Template
Pro Tip: Hyvä has a fallback mechanism that lets selected pages keep using your existing theme. That means you can migrate specific pages first and leave the rest on your current frontend until you’re ready.
Will My Existing Extensions Continue to Work?
This is one of the most common questions merchants ask before starting a Hyvä migration.
Extensions that only perform backend operations will continue to work without any changes. Examples include:
ERP integrations
CRM integrations
Inventory synchronization
Order synchronization
Product import and export
Payment processing
Shipping integrations
Extensions that add or modify frontend functionality, however, must be compatible with Hyvä.
Fortunately, most Magento extension vendors now offer Hyvä-compatible versions of their extensions, and upgrading to that version is often enough to restore the same functionality on your new storefront.
For example, if you use a blog extension, the backend content management remains unchanged, but the storefront templates that display blog posts must be replaced with Hyvä-compatible templates.
Before starting your migration, it’s worth auditing all frontend extensions and replacing them with Hyvä-compatible alternatives where required. You can also browse our collection of Hyvä-Compatible Magento Extensions.
Does My Checkout Change?
Not necessarily.
Hyvä’s fallback mechanism means selected pages, including checkout, can keep using your existing Magento theme. Many merchants start by keeping their current checkout while migrating the rest of the storefront to Hyvä. That keeps the migration simpler and the checkout fully functional throughout the transition.
Pro Tip: Since you’re already investing in the migration, it’s worth considering Hyvä Checkout too. It’s faster than the default checkout and matches the performance gains you’re getting on the rest of the storefront.
How Long Does a Hyvä Migration Take?
For most Magento stores, a Hyvä migration takes one to two months, depending on factors such as:
Existing storefront design
Number of CMS pages
Custom frontend functionality
Third-party extensions
Whether you plan to redesign the store
Checkout customization
Pro Tip: To reduce both development time and design costs, you can start with a professionally designed Hyvä template instead of building every page from scratch. We recently reviewed several options in our guide to the Top Premium Hyvä Theme Templates.
What to Expect After Your Hyvä Store Goes Live
This is the stage every merchant looks forward to. If your Hyvä store is built correctly, following Hyvä’s development best practices, you should see real improvements in performance and user experience.
Immediate Results After Launch
You can generally expect:
Google PageSpeed scores of 90+ for most pages.
Much faster page loading on desktop and mobile devices.
Improved Core Web Vitals.
Better frontend accessibility.
Cleaner HTML that’s easier for search engines and AI-powered tools to understand.
Results Over the Next Two to Three Months
As search engines re-crawl and re-index your website, you may begin to see additional business benefits, including:
Improved search engine rankings.
Better Core Web Vitals in Google Search Console.
Increased organic traffic.
Higher conversion rates due to a faster shopping experience.
Improved customer engagement with lower page abandonment.
The exact outcome depends on your content, overall SEO strategy, site design, and how well the migration itself was implemented.
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