Luma vs Hyvä Theme for Magento 2:We Tested Both — Here’s the Real Difference

If you’ve been running a Magento 2 store for a while, you’ve probably heard the name Hyvä come up more and more in conversations about performance. Maybe a developer mentioned it. Maybe you saw a competitor’s store loading noticeably faster. Maybe you ran a PageSpeed test on your own Luma-based store and didn’t love what you saw.

We get this question from store owners regularly now:”Should we switch to Hyvä? Is it really that much better? And what does the migration actually involve?”

So instead of giving you a generic answer, we tested it ourselves. Our store at store.aimsinfosoft.com runs on the Hyvä theme, and we put it through Google PageSpeed Insights. Then we looked at what the same store would score on a typical Luma setup — and the gap was not small.

Here’s the honest, complete comparison.

The Score That Started This Conversation

The Luma estimates are based on a conservative ~30% reduction — consistent with what the broader Magento community reports across real-world stores. In practice, Hyvä delivers 80–96 PageSpeed scores versus Luma’s typical 18–45 on many store builds, so the gap can be even wider depending on your extension stack and server setup.

A 98 vs 68 on performance might look like just 30 points on a chart. In real terms, it’s the difference between a store that customers enjoy using and one they quietly abandon.

Why Is Luma So Much Slower? It’s Not Bad Code — It’s Old Code

This is the thing people misunderstand about Luma. It’s not that Luma was badly built. When Magento 2 launched in 2015, Luma’s technology choices were perfectly reasonable for the time.

The problem is what “reasonable in 2015” looks like to a customer on a mobile device in 2026.

Luma’s frontend stack is built on RequireJS, KnockoutJS, and jQuery — a combination that was considered modern over a decade ago. In 2026, your customers are using modern mobile browsers on varying network speeds, and those 2013 tools ship a lot of JavaScript. The browser has to download, parse, and execute all of it before the page is interactive.

How much JavaScript are we actually talking about? Luma ships 700 KB to 1.2 MB of JavaScript on a typical product detail page after parse. Hyvä ships 50 to 100 KB. That’s roughly a 10x reduction in JS execution time, which directly affects Total Blocking Time (TBT) and Interaction to Next Paint (INP).

To put it another way: Luma typically generates around 230 HTTP requests for a standard product page load, while Hyvä reduces this to under 50 requests.

230 requests vs 50. That’s not a performance tweak — that’s a completely different architecture.

What Is Hyvä and Why Does It Work So Much Better?

Hyvä (pronounced “hoo-vah” — Finnish for “good”) is a Magento 2 frontend theme built from scratch in 2021 by Willem Wigman, a veteran Magento developer who was simply fed up with how slow and complex the default frontend had become.

Instead of patching Luma, he threw it out and rebuilt the frontend with two modern,
lightweight tools:

• Alpine.js — a minimal JavaScript framework that handles interactivity in about
  14kb
• Tailwind CSS — a utility-first CSS framework that only ships the styles you
  actually use

The result is a frontend that loads like a completely different platform. A standard Magento theme loads 200+ JS/CSS resources (1.5 megabytes), while Hyvä loads just two resources (0.2 megabytes).

And in November 2025, Hyvä made a significant move: Hyvä went fully open source under the OSL3 and AFL3 licenses. The previous EUR 1,000 per year license fee for the core theme is eliminated. The core theme is now free. Hyvä Checkout, Hyvä Enterprise, and Hyvä Commerce remain commercial products — but the barrier to entry for the theme itself is gone.

The Head-to-Head Breakdown

This is the part most security blogs gloss over with a table and move on. We’re not going to do that. These vulnerabilities affect real things on your store — your customers, your data, your revenue. Here’s what each category means in plain language.

1. Performance & Page Speed

This is where the difference is most visible and most impactful.

Luma: Built on a multi-layer JavaScript dependency stack that loads and initialises dozens of libraries before a page is interactive. Every additional extension you install typically adds more JavaScript to this pile. On mobile connections — where most of your customers are — this creates a measurable delay before customers can scroll, tap, and buy.

Hyvä: Alpine.js handles interactivity with a fraction of the JavaScript. Tailwind CSS is
purged at build time so only the CSS classes actually used in your theme ship to the browser. Pages load fast on desktop and remain fast on mobile, which is where most Magento stores are actually struggling.

Real-world impact: According to Navigate Commerce, NetworkStore.ro saw page load times decrease by 80%, session duration increase by 30%, and conversion rates increase by 25% within the first month after migration. Core Web Vitals are Google’s way of measuring the actual experience your customers have on your store. Three metrics matter most: LCP (how fast the main content appears), INP (how quickly the page responds to taps and clicks), and CLS (how much the layout shifts as the page loads).

Luma struggles specifically with CLS. Luma’s Knockout-driven layout shifts consistently push CLS past the 0.1 threshold that triggers a “Poor” CLS classification in Google’s field data. A “Poor” CLS rating directly affects your search ranking — Google treats it as a signal that your store delivers a bad experience.

Hyvä’s Alpine.js-driven reactivity has dramatically less layout shift because the DOM is mostly server-rendered. Pages appear stable immediately. Nothing jumps around while the JavaScript catches up.

For any store that depends on organic search traffic — and most stores do — this difference in Core Web Vitals translates directly to ranking and revenue.

2. Mobile Experience

More than 60% of eCommerce traffic in 2026 comes from mobile devices. This is where Luma’s age shows most painfully.

All that JavaScript that Luma loads has to be downloaded and parsed on a mobile device, often on a 4G connection that isn’t as fast as your office WiFi. The result is a store that feels slow to real customers, even if your server is fast and your hosting is good.

Hyvä was designed with mobile as a first priority, not an afterthought. Hyvä puts mobile first, which ensures that your store works perfectly regardless of the device. The lightweight stack means pages load quickly on mobile, interactions feel snappy, and customers don’t abandon because the page took four seconds to become usable.

3. Developer Experience & Customisation

This one matters if you have a development team working on your store regularly.

Luma uses a complex template inheritance system with multiple layers — layout XML files, LESS CSS, RequireJS configuration, KnockoutJS components, and UIComponents. Making a simple visual change often requires touching files across four or five different locations. Onboarding a new developer takes significant time, and debugging frontend issues is genuinely painful.

Hyvä uses standard HTML templates with Alpine.js and Tailwind. Frontend developers who know modern web development can be productive in days, not weeks. Customisations are straightforward and isolated. The codebase is small enough to actually understand.

The practical implication: development work on Hyvä costs less and takes less time. Changes that take days on Luma often take hours on Hyvä.

4. SEO Performance

Our Hyvä store scored 100/100 on SEO in Google PageSpeed Insights. That perfect score isn’t just about meta tags — it reflects the technical foundation underneath

Hyvä’s clean and minimal codebase minimises technical SEO issues such as excessive HTML tags. In contrast, Luma offers a reasonable SEO foundation, but its performance is usually questioned.

The SEO connection to performance is direct. Google uses Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal. A store with a 98 Performance score and passing Core Web Vitals will consistently outrank a store with a 68 Performance score in competitive search results, all else being equal. Performance is SEO now — they’re not separate conversations.

5. Extension Compatibility

This is where Luma has a genuine advantage — for now.

Because Luma has been the default Magento theme for over a decade, virtually every extension available for Magento 2 was built to work with it out of the box. If you install an extension on a Luma store, the frontend UI typically just works.

Hyvä uses a different frontend approach, so extensions that render UI through KnockoutJS or RequireJS need a compatibility layer to work with Hyvä. The good news is that over 1,680 Magento 2 extensions are now officially compatible with Hyvä. The major vendors — Aheadworks, Amasty, MageWorx — have published Hyvä-compatible versions of their popular modules.

Before migrating to Hyvä, an extension audit is essential. Some stores find that most of their extensions already have Hyvä support. Others find a handful that need custom compatibility work. Knowing this upfront is what makes migrations go smoothly.

6. Cost

For a long time, Hyvä’s licence fee (€1,000/year) was a factor in the decision. That’s no longer the case.

In November 2025, Hyvä went fully open source and the licence fee for the core theme was eliminated. You can use the Hyvä theme on any Magento 2 store at no licence cost.

The remaining costs for a Hyvä migration are development time — primarily the extension compatibility audit and any custom module adaptation work. For most stores, the revenue payback model is straightforward: take your current monthly revenue, apply a conservative 15% to 25% conversion rate improvement for a store moving from sub-50 PageSpeed to 90+, and divide the migration cost by the monthly revenue uplift. Most mid-market stores see payback inside 6 to 9 months.

Side-by-Side Comparison Table

Who Should Switch to Hyvä?

Hyvä makes clear sense if:

• Your PageSpeed score is below 70 and your bounce rate is climbing
• More than half your traffic comes from mobile
• You depend on organic search for customer acquisition
• You’re planning a redesign or replatform anyway
• Your development team is spending too much time on frontend changes
• You’re running a high-traffic store where every 100ms of load time costs conversions

Luma might still work if:

• You’re a small store with minimal traffic and tight budget constraints
• You have heavily customised Luma templates with complex extension integrations
• You need to go live quickly and can’t accommodate an extension audit right now
• Your current PageSpeed scores are already reasonable (above 70) and conversion
  rates are strong

The honest answer is that for most stores planning to grow, Hyvä is the better foundation. The question is timing and planning.

What Does a Hyvä Migration Actually Involve?

This is what most comparison blogs skip over, so we’ll be direct about it.

A typical Hyvä migration involves four phases:

1. Extension compatibility audit — Every extension on your store gets checked against
   the Hyvä compatibility list. Extensions without native support need either a community
   compatibility module or custom development work. This audit is what determines your
   migration scope and budget.
2. Theme development — Your store’s design gets rebuilt in Hyvä templates. If you’re
   keeping the same design, this is primarily a translation exercise. If you’re redesigning,
   this is where the creative work happens alongside the technical migration.
3. Staging and testing — The full store runs on Hyvä in staging with production data
   mirrored. Checkout, payment, account flows, search, and all custom functionality get
   tested end-to-end.
4. Production cutover — Go-live with a rollback plan ready. Post-launch monitoring for
   24–48 hours.

The timeline varies based on your extension stack complexity and how much custom frontend work your store has. A store with a straightforward extension setup can migrate in 4–6 weeks. A heavily customised store with many custom modules takes longer.

WhyAims Infosoft Recommends Hyvä for Growth-Focused Stores

We run our own store on Hyvä — and the scores you see (98 Performance, 96 Accessibility, 100 SEO) are real, from a live store, not a demo environment. We switched because we saw the same thing our clients were seeing: Luma was holding stores back in ways that showed up directly in organic rankings, bounce rates, and conversion data.

Over the past decade, we’ve delivered Magento solutions for 50,000+ stores. We’ve done Luma builds, Hyvä migrations, and everything in between. If you want an honest assessment of whether Hyvä makes sense for your specific store — your traffic levels, your extension stack, your development budget — we’re happy to talk through it.

No sales pitch. Just a straight answer.

👉 Talk to Aims Infosoft About a Hyvä Migration →

Aims Infosoft — #1 Magento Solutions Provider | 10+ Years | 50,000+ Stores Served | 52+ Products | 12+ Extensions

Source: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/commerce-operations/release/notes/adobe-commerce/2-4-9