Do you still believe that website themes are solely about visual aesthetics? Amasty’s recent success story challenges this myth head-on. Having successfully performed a smooth migration of a European store to Hyvä, our team allowed the e-commerce business to enjoy not just the looks but also the speed, cross-device compatibility, and other benefits of Hyvä.
Follow our story below to see how themes – and Hyvä in particular – play an instrumental role in the optimization of e-commerce websites.
Risk of Continued Customer Loss
Our client faced issues with the functionality and performance of their online home décor store, powered by Magento. Due to the extremely slow loading speed, visitors often had to wait for dozens of seconds for the web pages to fully load, which led to poor user experience and customer frustrations. Besides, the speed negatively impacted the store's search engine rankings, limiting its discoverability.
A yet another challenge for both the visitors and the Client’s team involved the functional instability of the website. The e-commerce system would regularly crash or fail, discouraging potential customers from interacting with the website and complicating the Client's internal operations.
The most concerning result of these issues was, quite naturally, the decline of customer retention and acquisition rates. Slow site speed and frequent crashes prompted existing customers to migrate to competitors and new visitors – to bounce. All this led to customer loss, failure of marketing efforts in expanding online presence, and a reduced market share.
Web Store Audit by Amasty’s Team
Amasty’s team first suggested a comprehensive performance audit of the entire website, aiming to examine the server settings and audit the code. After completing the planned tasks, our team was able to draft a fact-based, detailed strategy for improving the website's performance.
The strategy included the following steps:
- Transition to a more stable hosting environment (the existing one was a major source of instability) and review of server configurations.
- Magento upgrade.
- Migration to a Hyvä theme.
- Code optimization for faster and more reliable website operation.
Hyvä Migration and Fine-tuning
To kickstart the process, the Amasty team migrated the client's website to a new server and upgraded Magento to the latest available version. This step ensured stability and laid the foundation for subsequent code optimization. Still, it wasn’t enough to achieve high performance on both desktop and mobile devices.
Following the initial plan, our team set up Hyvä and performed store migration to a Hyvä theme in a phased approach, excluding the checkout page. We rigorously updated the website's design to align with the new template, refined the code, and incorporated enhancements to meet all Hyvä's standards.
Additionally, we had to adapt the client's custom modules to ensure their seamless integration with the new theme. Since the Client used a lot of Amasty’s extensions, which were already Hyvä-compatible, our main focus was on optimizing and adapting non-Amasty modules. Due to a smaller scope of work, we successfully accomplished this task within a very short timeframe.
Success
Both the desktop and mobile versions of the store underwent a substantial transformation during Amasty’s optimization and migration to Hyvä. The website's performance significantly improved, with the most noteworthy improvement being a remarkably fast loading speed. According to GTMetrix, the store takes less than 1 second (887 mms) to load on any device. Besides, the home decor store now fully meets Google Pagespeed Insights performance standards:
But the true measure of this project's success lies in the tangible impact it had on the Client’s business. In just a single month following the transition to the Hyvä theme, the home décor store saw a significant increase in orders.
