Fastco

You could spend the next 10 minutes reading about what Hyvä is and how it gave our client a performance boost. You’d learn some interesting things and probably come to the conclusion that Hyvä is a great upgrade for Magento 2.

Or, you could hop straight onto our clients site and experience the awesome performance for yourself. 

Do you want to read about the car, or do you want to test drive it?

Test Drive Hyvä Site

So, now that you’ve taken it for a spin, I bet you are asking: how did Verve make a Magento 2 site that fast?

The Background:

We have worked with Fastco for over a decade, originally building their Magento 2 site and assisting with a wide range of marketing since. Fastco are one of the leading suppliers of fixers, fastenings, nuts, bolts and screws. The pandemic accelerated their transition to being primarily an eCommerce business, and online sales have been growing ever since. With sales up 50% year on year, this was a great time to empower further growth by delivering lightning speed and a slicker design for their growing number of online customers.

The Challenge:

Magento 2 delivered all the complex functionality Fastco requires, enabling them to have custom shipping rates, a vast catalogue and an array of plugins. However, as with most Magento 2 sites, performance was being sacrificed at the altar of customisation. Fastco needed a solution to deliver better performance without sacrificing their bespoke website or endangering sales. The solution was Hyvä, and the uptick in performance has been spectacular.

The Solution:

Hyvä is the missing piece of the Magento 2 puzzle; it’s the front-end Magento 2 always needed. The Hyvä theme is ingenious; they have rebuilt the entire Magento 2 frontend from the ground up, stripping out heavy elements and using newer, innovative technologies like Tailwind. A standard Magento theme loads over 200 JS/CSS resources (1.5 megabytes), Hyvä loads only 2 JS/CSS resources (0.2 megabytes)! 

Less code makes it easier to work with and crucially, helps result in a much faster website. Any eCommerce manager who has spent the last decade trying to wrestle performance out of the standard Luma frontend, will know that achieving good Google PageSpeed scores on a complex Magento 2 build was nigh-on impossible. Hyvä makes perfect scores achievable.

Why Are Performance Scores Important?

Most eCommerce stores work very hard to get traffic onto their site. When you finally find that customer with buying intent, the last thing you want to do is make them wait. Load times are kryptonite to buying intent and this means bad performance equals bad conversion rates. You’ll get more people abandoning carts, or even giving up part-way through building a basket because they simply cannot be bothered to wait for your website to catch up with their brain.

In addition to improving user experience and thus conversion rates, performance is a key indicator used by Googles ranking algorithm. If your site scored well on page insights and passes all of its Core Web Vitals, then it will rank better, period.

A Win-Win

In addition to massively bolstering performance and improving SEO, this upgrade also gave us a chance to redesign several parts of the website. The result is a more modern Adobe Commerce store which features more social proof and delivers a better user experience. Improving speed will increase conversion anyway, but a Hyvä upgrade from Verve also gives you the chance to improve your product pages and checkout. We are data-driven and can build a bespoke, evolving website that is continually optimised to convert more of the traffic you pay for.

The Results:

We’ve talked about the results improving, and you’ve likely browsed Fastco and been blown away by its speed. Above you can see the initial impact of these changes. We expected an increase, but we are delighted by the scans we have run. With more optimisation to make, this site can only get quicker and those scores will only increase. For most eCommerce sites, four scores above 80 is a pipe-dream. Give Verve a chance with Hyvä and we will make your website lightning fast.