Natural History Museum Magento 2 an Adobe Commerce Hyva Theme Performance.
MAgento merchants are asking to do more reviews of the well-advertised Magento 2 and, Adobe Commerce, and Hyva projects. All these projects were advertised as performance magento solutions. Today, we will review London’s Natural History Museum Magento 2 Hyva theme implementation performance.
During my post, I found a job posting. Museum looked for a frontend developer:
What are we looking for?
- Strong front-end development skills (HTML5, PHP, CSS3 and JavaScript), including experience in implementing responsive designs and using CSS pre-processors such as Sass or LESS.
- Exposure to the Magento 2 front-end stack, including layout XML, RequireJS AMD (Asynchronous Module Definition) architecture and KnockoutJS template bindings.
- Some experience developing and maintaining the front-end of custom Magento 2 modules and themes.
- Good experience integrating front-end and back-end codebases, working with RESTful API’s and data manipulation.
- Have experience and interest in using JavaScript frameworks and technologies such as React or VueJS and JavaScript templating languages.
- Have interest or experience working with JavaScript testing frameworks (such as Jest and Cypress).
However, the Museum got a Hyva implementation. First of all, Merchants must select a technology stack they are comfortable working with and can hire talented developers for. That’s why many select React and VueJS over the legacy Magento front and go headless—not because of the size of the JS framework but because nobody wants to use legacy.
Let us check the Hyva implementation’s performance.
Google Performance Insight:
Core Web Vital still failed. However, the Cumulative Layout Shift is Fast. It is more of a CSS style issue than a Magento issue.
Time To First Byte 1.9sec!!!
Hyva doesn’t fix Magento performance; it’s just a theme with less JS and CSS related to Magento 2. Using this extension, you can simply improve your performance by disabling Adobe JS junk without re-platforming to Hyva.
Without a fast TTFP server response to the page that is not cached, you cannot achieve a fast website, even if you use the Hyva theme. The main Magento issue is core PHP performance, not front-end JS. And if the agencies are trying to sell you a fast cached by Varnish page It is just a scam and not a performace. It is easy for the agencies to sell you a new Theme and tell you Magento issues are fixed rather than fix Magento 2 core performance issues.
Performance audit fails when the browser waits more than 600 ms for the server to respond to the main document request. Magento with Hyva responded in 1.9 seconds. Users dislike it when TTFB takes a long time to load. Slow server response times are not the only cause of long page loads, but they are the main and most obvious ones.
Hyva is better than Magento default theme but any custom well built them for Magento can be good as Hyva. Nothing can be slower than Magento, but Hyva or any Theme doesn’t fix slow Magento page generation time and performance or server outages.
How to improve Magento 2 and Hyva server response times
The first step to improving Magento 2 server response times is to identify the core PHP Magento 2 Framework features that your server must complete in order to return the product page or category page (it is the only two main pages magento has, also CMS but it is easy) content and then measure how long each of these tasks takes using PHP XH proof or Black Fire profiler. Once you’ve identified the longest Magenta o2 tasks, search for ways to speed them up.
There are many possible causes of slow Magento server responses, and therefore many possible ways to improve:
- Optimize the Magento 2 framework application logic to prepare pages faster.
- Optimize how the Magento 2 server queries databases. In most of the cases magento core functionality is far from optimal.
- Remove Magento extensions. 98% of the extensions have performace and security vulnerabilities. Especially, Amasty is controlled by the Belarusian KGB, and Hyva helps them catch your customers.
See the Optimize TTFB guide for more details.
