Hyvä theme is now free: what does this mean for your Magento webshop?

On November 10, 2025, something remarkable happened in the e-commerce world. Hyvä Themes, the performance revolution for Magento 2, made an unexpected decision. The theme that set the standard for speed and efficiency for five years is now completely open source and free to use.

For store owners struggling with slow load times, high bounce rates, and complex frontend development, this is a game-changer. Where you previously paid €1,000 for a license, you can now benefit from the fastest Magento frontend without any financial barrier.

But what does this mean in concrete terms? Why did Hyvä do this? And more importantly, what changes for your webshop?

The decision to make Hyvä open source is not a spontaneous action. It was part of the plan from the beginning. Five years ago, Hyvä emerged out of pure necessity. The Magento community had too few choices on the frontend. The default Luma theme was outdated and increasingly hard to maintain. The only other option was a complex PWA solution that not everyone was ready for or needed.

Hyvä offered a third path: a modern, lightweight frontend built on familiar PHP templates, powered by Tailwind CSS and Alpine.js. Simple, fast, and developer-friendly.

After five years, Hyvä has grown into a reliable platform with now more than 6,000 live webshops worldwide. Major brands like Nestlé, Volkswagen, Dunkin' and Jysk rely on it! The technology is proven. Now the Hyvä team wants to give that power back to the community that helped make it great.

By making Hyvä free, they are lowering the barrier. More developers can experiment with it. More agencies can offer it. More webshops can benefit from world-class performance without budget constraints.

It’s an investment in the future of the Magento ecosystem. And honestly? It’s also just good for business. A larger community means more innovation, more compatibility modules, and a stronger position against competitors.

The biggest change lies in the licensing model. Hyvä Theme is now licensed under OSL3 (Open Software License 3.0) and AFL3 (Academic Free License 3.0). These are the same licenses used by Magento Open Source. In concrete terms, this means you can:

• use the theme completely free of charge without any costs or licensing obligations. The code is publicly accessible via GitHub and anyone can get started with it.
• build commercial themes on top of Hyvä and sell them under your own terms. This opens doors for creative developers and agencies to create a new ecosystem of paid themes.
• contribute to development by participating in the open source community. With more than 4,300 developers in the Hyvä Slack community, the collective intelligence of thousands of professionals is harnessed to accelerate innovation.

There is another important change. Hyvä UI, the library of reusable components, has now become a separate product priced at €250. This was previously included in the €1,000 license. For webshops that want to develop quickly using ready-made components, this remains an attractive investment. But it is not required in order to use the Hyvä theme.

Good news for those already working with Hyvä: nothing really changes in your day-to-day use. Your existing webshop will keep running. Updates and support will continue just like you’re used to.

So what has changed? Only the Hyvä Theme itself has become free. All other products in the ecosystem remain paid. Think of Hyvä UI, Hyvä Checkout, and bundles such as Hyvä Commerce (Magento OS) or Hyvä Enterprise (Adobe Commerce). If you’ve chosen one of these solutions, the annual license fees will simply continue. Maintenance and support are also separate from the open-source license and are essential to keep your platform stable and secure.

So for most existing users, not much changes in practice: for new projects however, it becomes interesting: you can now opt for just the free theme, or you can invest in the additional products that enable faster development.

You also gain access to a growing community. More developers means more available knowledge, more compatibility modules for popular Magento extensions, and faster solutions for any challenges you may face.

Another barrier has disappeared. Where companies previously had to weigh up whether that €1,000 license would pay itself back, that question has now become irrelevant. The only investment you still make is the development time needed to migrate from Luma or another theme to Hyvä.

And that investment pays itself back quickly. Webshops that switch to Hyvä typically see:

• 15 to 30% higher conversion rates thanks to improved user experience and faster loading times. A faster webshop means more visitors stay, view more products and ultimately check out more often.
• Google Lighthouse scores above 90 for performance, accessibility and best practices. This directly translates into better SEO rankings and higher visibility in search engines.
• 20 to 50% shorter development time for future changes. The clean codebase and modern technology stack make it easier for developers to add features without having to wrestle with legacy code.

For companies that were hesitant due to budget constraints, this is the perfect moment to take the leap.

Let’s get concrete. What does a Hyvä migration actually bring to your webshop?

• Radically faster loading times thanks to a 98% reduction in page requests (only 5 requests versus 230 with standard Luma) and 86% less page weight (0.4MB versus 3MB uncompressed). Your webshop doesn’t just load faster, it literally flies.
• Lower bounce rates and higher engagement because visitors don’t drop off due to slow pages. Every second you gain in load time delivers measurable improvements in conversion.
• Modern development experience with Tailwind CSS and Alpine.js instead of outdated JavaScript libraries. Your developers work more efficiently and are more likely to stay engaged with your projects.
• Simpler maintenance thanks to a clean codebase with fewer dependencies. Updates are rolled out faster and bugs are easier to fix.
• Growing ecosystem with more than 800 compatibility modules for popular Magento extensions. The chance that your favourite plugin works with Hyvä increases every month.
• Better mobile performance because Hyvä was built mobile-first from day one. With more than 63% of e-commerce traffic coming from mobile, this is not a nice-to-have but a must.
• Future-proofing thanks to active development and an ever-growing community of 4,300+ developers worldwide who continuously contribute improvements.

Numbers don’t lie. Take, for instance, the implementation at several Mediahuis webshops, where PHPro was responsible for the Hyvä migration. The results speak volumes.

Performance increased from 79% to 99%. That’s not an incremental improvement, that’s a complete transformation. The structure of the code improved from 60% to 92%, which means future changes can be implemented much more smoothly.