Grasscity (Hyva)

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Grasscity (Hyva)

Grasscity.com stands out as a leading online headshop today, boasting a vibrant counterculture community forum with over 500,000 members. Initially, it began as a modest website offering smoking accessories alongside Amsterdam tourism tips. Leveraging the flexible multi-store and multi-currency features of Magento, Grasscity effortlessly expanded its online sales and grew its business. Today, it operates as a global entity, shipping products worldwide. Our collaboration with Grasscity kicked off in 2016, focusing on the development of a Magento Theme. This update enhanced the web store's look and functionality to align with business needs, enabling Grasscity to quickly adapt to emerging market trends and incorporate new business functionalities.

Why move to Hyva?

Performance improvements. It takes an enormous amount of time, money, and effort to speed up Magento website and it doesn’t allow you to 100/100 score on Google PageSpeed. But if you replace default Magento Luma theme with Hyva, you’ll see an incredible 100/100 and pass Core Web Vitals easier.

What is the magic? A standard Magento theme loads 200+ JS/CSS resources (1.5 megabytes), while Hyva loads just two (0.2 megabytes). Hyva’s creator Willem Wigman reduced complexity, removed RequireJS, Knockout and made web development fun again.

How much time and resources Hyva theme development take?

Hyva requires Magento 2.4.3 CE or higher, so if you have a lower version, you have to upgrade Magento first. From our experience, Hyva theme development is up to 30% faster and easier than Luma (default Magento) or up to 50% faster than Vue Storefront. But it also varies depending on project complexity, customizations, integrations with third-party systems, design and functionality requirements. For such a complex project as Grasscity, it took 5 months (over 1000 h). Our store store.eltrino.com we've developed in a month (~200 h) with the development of Stripe payment method.

What challenges did we face during the development?

Hyva-compatible integrations with third-party systems. Hyva has already a lot of compatibility modules and their number increases constantly. But with all the variety of exciting tools and systems on the market, it's very likely that you will need to develop some of that integrations on your own. We are pretty sure that in a few years, Hyva will have compatibility modules with the vast majority of third-party systems.(It was in 2022 and now there are more Hyva compatible integrations)

Page Builder. Despite Magento Page Builder being Hyva compatible it doesn't solve its internal issues and overcomplexity. Page Builder slows down the development process and has an impact on website performance itself.

Impact of third-party systems on performance. Hyva is blazing fast out-of-the-box but numerous injected JavaScript from third-party systems will inevitably slow down its performance. The more systems you have, the more complicated is the optimization and fewer opportunities to improve performance.