Magento Storefront Build and Customizations

Magento’s storefront and backend work hand-in-hand to create the shopping experience. The backend handles everything from product information to customer accounts, while the storefront displays this data in a user-friendly way on your store’s website. When customizing your theme, it’s essential to understand how these two layers connect—particularly how the PHTML templates and XML layout files pull data from the backend. While the frontend focuses on the look and feel of the store, it relies on backend configurations to ensure everything from product catalogs to shopping carts works seamlessly.

While they are technically separated, they’re tightly interconnected—meaning frontend developers often need to understand backend structures (like blocks and view models) to display dynamic content correctly. This coupling can sometimes complicate frontend changes, especially for less-experienced developers. For this reason it's also extremely difficult for two separate teams to work on frontend and backend independently. It's much more efficient to have one experienced team working on both in unison.

When choosing a modern storefront, you’ll want to ensure it's built with responsive web design principles—using flexible grids, media queries, and scalable assets. The most common approach so far has involved refactoring the theme using Magento's Blank theme as a foundation and layering the design on top.

Some merchants decide to use Luma, which is Magento's demo theme, meant to showcase Magento’s capabilities out of the box theme. Customizing Luma directly is possible, but it can become difficult to maintain long-term, especially when applying future Magento updates or patches, as it includes extra styling and frontend logic that can get in the way.

There's also an option of using a full-featured premium theme but use cases for those are very limited as they offer highly generic experience that's very difficult to customize outside of its predefined options and come with a lot of bloat. While these might work for small businnesses with not a lot of traffic they're really not suitable for medium to large-sized stores.

PWA (Progressive Web App) is also an option for merchants that heavily rely on mobile traffic or complex user journeys. Magento supports PWA development via PWA Studio, which delivers app-like performance and offline capabilities. However, PWA projects tend to be much more complex and expensive than traditional theming due to its advanced tech stack which requires a whole team that specializes in headless development.

For many businesses, opting for a Hyvä Theme — a new high-performance Magento theme that's quickly gaining massive popularity, provides a similar performance boost and mobile-first design as PWA, with significantly less development overhead. It’s a great option for merchants who want to modernize without committing to the complexities of full PWA development.

Hyvä Theme is a modern, performance-first frontend framework built for Magento 2 that replaces the default Luma stack. Unlike Luma, which is bloated with Knockout.js and complex layout XMLs, Hyvä is built using Tailwind CSS and Alpine.js, resulting in faster load times, simplified development, and drastically better Lighthouse scores. It’s ideal for stores that want a clean, fast, and modern experience without the heavy frontend baggage Magento is known for. Hyvä is also developer-friendly, cutting down on complexity and time-to-market for new features or design changes.

If you want to learn more about the benefits of using Hyvä check out our blog posts on myths about Hyvä and how it helps boost store's SEO. As Hyvä's Silver Partner we have a whole team that knows its ins and outs so feel free to contact us if you have any further questions.

Yes, but with a caveat. Hyvä doesn’t use Magento’s traditional UI components and JavaScript libraries, so extensions that rely on Knockout.js or RequireJS may need custom compatibility modules. The good news is that the Hyvä community is growing quickly, and many popular extensions now have official or community-supported Hyvä compatibility. When evaluating extensions, check if a Hyvä-compatible version exists or budget for development time to build one.

The Hyvä Theme offers an optional add-on called Hyvä Checkout—a modern, fast, and highly flexible checkout solution designed to work seamlessly with the Hyvä frontend. It delivers a significantly better user experience compared to Magento’s default checkout, with faster load times, simplified code, and easier customization.

That said, if your store already uses a highly customized Magento checkout—especially one deeply integrated with third-party modules or business-specific logic—you can continue using the default Magento checkout alongside Hyvä. This gives you time to transition gradually or keep existing workflows in place if needed.

However, upgrading to Hyvä Checkout may present some integration challenges, particularly if your current setup includes:

• Complex third-party checkout extensions
• Custom shipping/payment logic
• Legacy JavaScript or Knockout.js dependencies

In these cases, additional development effort may be required to migrate or rebuild those customizations within the Hyvä Checkout framework. The good news is that Hyvä Checkout is built to be developer-friendly and extendable, making it a solid long-term investment for performance and flexibility.

In short: you’re not locked in—Hyvä gives you options depending on your business needs and development roadmap.