Hyvä vs Breeze - Boost your pagespeed

Magento offers tonnes of fantastic features but includes a huge amount of Javascript files which bloat your website. Achieving a great Google Page Speed score is almost an impossibility with a standard theme. We never use "off the shelf" themes but all themes inherit from a base theme. Magento's standard has been the Luma theme.

There are now a couple of great new base themes on the market; Hyvä and Breeze. Both of these technologies streamline Magento's Javascript and offer numerous performance benefits. In this article, we will discuss which is right for you.

Breeze

The best part of Breeze is that you don't need to re-build or re-design the site to implement it. Breeze offers a module which can be installed, which removes the need for Magento's outdated and bloated Require.js. This can cause issues with third-party modules that are powered by Javascript. These will have to be converted to Breeze which can be a tricky task. Breeze does offer some compatible module versions but they are lagging behind Hyvä in this regard.

We recently installed the Breeze module for one of our customers Skinshop.co.uk. After deploying our work we saw the Page Speed Scores improve from 49 to 90.

If you want to redesign your site then Breeze does offer a variety of excellent performing base themes. My personal favourite is Breeze's Evolution theme. All their base Magento themes are high-performance and utilise lightweight CSS (styling) libraries such as Tailwind CSS. Due to Breeze's lack of compatible third-party modules "off the shelf", we would suggest Hyva over Breeze for new build sites.

Hyvä

If you are looking to implement a new design we would strongly recommend basing it on Hyvä. A standard Magento theme loads over 200 JS/CSS resources (1,5 megabytes), and Hyvä loads only 2 JS/CSS resources (0,2 megabytes)! Hyva offers compatibility with a wide range of third-party modules out of the box which is increasing all the time. The lifetime cost of Hyvä is around £1,000 which is cheaper than most theme providers charge for a single year.

We recently launched our first Hyvä-based website Boardshop.co.uk. Without us doing any performance-based work the site it is passing all of Google's real-world metrics.

If you are thinking about building a new theme Hyvä is the way to go. No compromises are needed on third-party modules and offers high scores out of the box.

In Summary

Both Hyvä and Breeze target Magento users looking to enhance the performance and user experience of their e-commerce stores. Hyva, with its robust architecture and wide module compatibility, comes with a price but offers extensive customisation capabilities. Meanwhile, Breeze's emphasis on lightweight design and easy integration provides a more immediate performance enhancement without the need for a complete theme rebuild.

Contact us today if you are interested in discussing these technologies more for your site.