Until November 2025, the first objection to Hyvä was its €1,000 licence fee. The theme is free now. So choosing between Hyvä and Luma comes down to speed, extensions and what your store needs over the next few years.
The short answer
If your store is growing and most of your traffic comes from phones, move to Hyvä. If you’re not changing the frontend this year, you rely on a lot of niche extensions, and the site is already quick on mobile, stay on Luma and spend the money somewhere that pays back sooner. We’d tell you the same in a workshop (and we’ve turned down Hyvä builds for exactly that reason).
| Luma | Hyvä | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Magento’s default frontend | A replacement frontend for Magento 2 and Adobe Commerce |
| Built on | RequireJS, jQuery, Knockout and LESS | Alpine.js and Tailwind CSS |
| Page weight | 200+ JavaScript and CSS files, about 1.5MB | Two files, about 0.2MB |
| Licence | Free | Theme free since November 2025. Hyvä Checkout €1,000 |
| Extensions | Almost everything works out of the box | Anything on the frontend needs a Hyvä-compatible version |
| Speed work | Ongoing, to pass Core Web Vitals | Fast from launch |
| Best for | Stores that aren’t changing the frontend | Growing stores with mostly mobile traffic |
Why Luma is slow
Luma ships with Magento 2, which is why most stores start on it. It works with almost every extension, because vendors build and test against it first.
The problem is what it makes the browser load. Luma’s frontend is built on RequireJS, jQuery, Knockout and LESS, layered up since the early days of Magento 2. In Eltrino’s side-by-side test, a standard Luma store sent over 200 JavaScript and CSS files, about 1.5MB, on first load. The Hyvä build sent two files, about 0.2MB.
On a laptop on office wifi you barely notice. On a mid-range phone on 4G, you notice. Most of your customers shop that way. Factor Blue tested the same category page on an iPhone X: 7 seconds on Luma, 1.4 seconds on Hyvä.
You can make Luma faster. It costs, though. You pay in developer hours, and the gains wear off every time someone adds an extension or another tracking script.
What Hyvä changes
Hyvä replaces the frontend and nothing else. Your catalogue, orders, customers, admin and integrations stay exactly where they are, which makes it a far smaller risk than moving platform.
It throws out Luma’s JavaScript stack and rebuilds what your customers see on Alpine.js and Tailwind CSS. Less code makes pages faster, but it also makes development faster. When a client once gave us six weeks to build what would normally take eighteen, Hyvä is the reason we hit the date.
Changes after launch get cheaper as well. A checkout customisation that would cost £30,000 to £40,000 on Luma usually comes in at £10,000 to £20,000 on Hyvä, because there’s so much less code to work around.
When we rebuilt Helmet City’s frontend on Hyvä, we took four seconds off the load time and conversion went up 16% before we’d run a single test. Then the CRO retainer added another 9%.
Extensions are Luma’s real advantage
Luma works with nearly every Magento extension out of the box. Hyvä is pickier. It needs a compatible version of anything that touches the frontend. Most of the big vendors ship one now, but some niche extensions don’t, and those have to be rebuilt, replaced or switched off.
This is the bit that decides what moving costs you. A store running 15 frontend extensions and a store running 60 are very different projects, so get them audited before anyone gives you a price.
What each one costs
The Hyvä Theme is free. Hyvä Checkout is €1,000 one-off, then €250 a year from year two, and you’ll want it, because Magento’s standard checkout is one of the slowest parts of a Luma store.
Luma costs nothing upfront. What the price leaves out is the optimisation work it needs to keep passing Core Web Vitals, which you pay for again and again in developer hours.
A new Hyvä site with us starts at £46,000 + VAT, and a frontend rebuild on your existing Magento store costs less. We’ve broken down what a Hyvä build costs, including the parts that move the price.
When to stay on Luma
Stay put if you’re not touching the frontend this year. Stay put if you depend on niche extensions with no Hyvä version, or if your site already passes Core Web Vitals on mobile (Search Console will tell you).
Stay put, too, if you’re likely to leave Magento in the next year or so. If Shopify is on the cards, putting money into a new Magento frontend makes no sense.
When to move to Hyvä
Move if most of your sales come from phones. Move if you’re paying for traffic and your Core Web Vitals are failing. Move if every small frontend change takes weeks and costs more than it should. And move if the design hasn’t been touched since lockdown, because a rebuild is the cheapest moment to fix that too.
Our Hyvä page covers how we run these projects, and if you’re on Magento Open Source, our Magento 2 development work picks up everything behind the frontend.
When did someone last load your store on a phone and time it?
