Grasscity
Grasscity, a global cannabis accessories leader, replatformed its Magento 2 store with the Hyvä theme—achieving faster performance, cleaner code, seamless integrations, and a scalable eCommerce experience across all devices.
Jul 2016 - Feb 2023
Grasscity, one of the largest online headshops globally, serves a vast community of customers with thousands of products and millions of monthly visitors. Migration to Hyvä significantly improved performance and result in visually captivating user experience.
About the project
Grasscity is one of the most recognized online retailers in the cannabis accessories market. It has a vibrant community forum with over half a million members, where users can engage and share experiences. The site offers a wide range of products, including smoking gear, vaporizers, and lifestyle essentials.
In the early begging, it was a small website that sold smoking accessories and provided Amsterdam tourism information. With the multi-store architecture and multi-currency capabilities of Magento, Grasscity found it easy to sell online and expand their business. And now it’s an international company that ships worldwide.
Our collaboration with Grasscity began in 2016 when we developed the Magento Theme. This project focused on updating the web store's appearance and functionality to align with business needs. As a result, Grasscity can quickly respond to new market trends and implement innovative business features. Operating in a highly competitive market, Grasscity is committed to enhancing customer experience and differentiating itself from competitors by continually introducing new features. To achieve this goal, Grasscity required a frontend capable of meeting the scale and expectations of its audience.
Like many established Magento stores, the platform faced growing pains—particularly in terms of performance, mobile responsiveness, and frontend development agility. Speed and scalability were becoming bottlenecks, especially on mobile, and integrating modern UI technologies had become increasingly complex and time-consuming.
To address this, Grasscity undertook a full frontend replatforming using Hyvä, a modern, performance-first Magento 2 theme designed to deliver exceptional speed, reduced complexity, and a better developer experience.
The result was a lightning-fast, fully customized storefront with improved Core Web Vitals, cleaner code, and a future-proof foundation that makes ongoing development faster, easier, and far more scalable.
What we did in the early years (2016–2021)
Our collaboration with Grasscity began back in 2016, when they were running on Magento 1 Enterprise (1.13.0.2). As their long-term technical partner, we supported the platform across multiple international storefronts, including the Netherlands, UK, and US.
We focused on building a solid, scalable eCommerce foundation that supported Grasscity’s growing global operations. This involved both custom development and complex system integration, ensuring the store remained competitive and flexible in a rapidly evolving market.
Key services delivered during 2016–2021:
🔧 Custom responsive Magento 1 theme development
🌍 Multi-store setup and internationalization
🔄 Store switcher by currency or location
🗂 Multi-store product management
📦 ERP integration
🧾 Advanced tax and shipping rule configuration
💳 Custom payment & checkout features
📈 Performance optimization and technical support
🔁 Magento 1 to Magento 2 migration planning
Why move to Hyva?
Magento 2 is known for its robust backend capabilities and scalability—but its default frontend theme, Luma, often struggles under the weight of modern performance and user experience expectations. Grasscity had reached a point where further optimizing Luma was both costly and inefficient.
Out of the box, the Luma theme loads over 200 JavaScript and CSS resources, often totaling 1.5MB per page load. That level of weight made it virtually impossible to pass Core Web Vitals consistently, especially on mobile devices.
In contrast, Hyvä dramatically reduces that complexity. It loads just two JS/CSS files (~0.2MB) and eliminates Magento’s reliance on RequireJS, Knockout, and bloated UI components. This radical simplification allows stores to achieve 100/100 PageSpeed scores, dramatically better performance metrics, and a more agile development environment.
Hyvä is not only lighter—it's also developer-friendly, making frontend customization easier and faster without sacrificing flexibility or quality. For Grasscity, it was the perfect opportunity to boost site performance and scalability while maintaining the Magento backend they relied on.
How much time and resources Hyva theme development take?
Hyva requires Magento 2.4.3 CE or higher, so if you have a lower version, you have to upgrade to Magento first.
From our experience, Hyva theme development is faster and easier than Luma (default Magento) or Vue Storefront. But it also varies depending on project complexity, customizations, integrations with third-party systems, design and functionality requirements. For such a complex project as Grasscity, it took 5 months (over 1000 h). Our store store.eltrino.com we've developed in a month (~200 h) with the development of Stripe payment method.
It should be noted that in 2022, the Hyva Theme was relatively new, and like any emerging technology, it lacked many ready integrations and features that are available today. Also ready Hyva UI components that are available now and can dramatically speed up the development process. So developing the same project now would take less time.
Development challenges in 2022—and What’s better today
1. Hyvä-Compatible Integrations
One of the biggest advantages of Hyvä is its growing ecosystem of compatibility modules. However, in 2022, many third-party tools still lacked official Hyvä support.
For instance, Grasscity used Stamped.io for product reviews, but there was no out-of-the-box Hyvä module for it. We developed a custom integration from scratch to maintain seamless user-generated content without losing performance gains. Now there are 1,600+ Hyva-Compatible Extensions and this number is growing.
Another unique element of the project was the Important Features Block, which required an external API integration pulling data from another store. Building this into the Hyvä-based frontend required custom frontend/backend syncing and layout work.
2. Magento Page Builder Constraints
Magento’s Page Builder is now fully compatible with Hyvä, but back then, it suffered from bloat and performance issues. While the content management capabilities it provides are useful for marketers, the underlying structure slows down frontend rendering and complicates development.
We had to find a balance—retaining the content flexibility that Grasscity needed while optimizing Page Builder blocks and layouts for speed and clean output.
3. Impact of Third-Party Scripts on Performance
Hyvä is blazingly fast out of the box—but the real-world performance of any Magento site also depends on how it integrates with marketing tools, search engines, personalization systems, and analytics platforms.
For Grasscity, several systems injected external JavaScript that added weight to the pages:
- Klaviyo for marketing automation
- Klevu for intelligent site search
- Nosto for product recommendations
- Route for shipping protection
- Bolt for checkout
- Magefan for blogging
Each of these systems had to be reviewed, optimized, or adapted to ensure their scripts didn’t undermine the performance advantages Hyvä brought to the table. Where possible, we deferred script loading, minimized rendering blocks, and used asynchronous techniques.
Integrating third-party scripts—such as those from Klaviyo, Klevu, Nosto, Route, Bolt, and Magefan—can significantly enhance eCommerce functionality. However, these scripts can also impact website performance by increasing load times and affecting user experience. Since 2022, many of these providers have made optimizations to mitigate such issues:
Klaviyo has optimized its JavaScript to load asynchronously, aiming to minimize its impact on site performance. Despite this, tools like Google PageSpeed Insights may still flag it as a contributing factor to load times.
In its 4.x extension for Magento, Klevu introduced optimized JavaScript loading, ensuring most scripts load at the end of the page or in a non-blocking manner. This enhancement improves page load speeds and overall user experience.
Nosto has focused on performance optimization, particularly in its search functions, to handle large product databases efficiently.
Route has integrated shipping protection directly within shipping methods, streamlining the process and potentially reducing additional script loads.
Bolt's scripts are designed to load after the main webpage content, preventing delays in page rendering and ensuring a smoother user experience.
Magefan offers a suite of performance optimization extensions for Magento 2, including tools for lazy loading images and optimizing JavaScript, contributing to improved site speed.
Keep in Mind: Every Integration Has a Cost
Even with a blazing-fast frontend like Hyvä, performance isn’t only about your theme—it's also about what you connect to it.
The more third-party systems you integrate—whether for marketing, search, analytics, personalization, or reviews—the more scripts your site needs to load. Each one adds complexity, affects page speed, and increases the effort needed for performance optimization.
Many third-party providers are improving their code, but merchants should still plan carefully, prioritize essential tools, and continuously audit what runs on the storefront. Maintaining high performance requires a balance between rich functionality and frontend efficiency.
Results
Source: rumvision.com
After migrating to the Hyvä theme, Grasscity achieved a dramatic improvement in site performance, responsiveness, and user experience. The new frontend delivered significantly better Core Web Vitals scores, especially on mobile, and helped the site reach a high PageSpeed UX score.
Hyvä’s lightweight architecture reduced complexity, improved loading times, and made the storefront more stable and interactive. These enhancements not only boosted SEO and conversion potential but also laid the foundation for faster future development and long-term scalability.
Grasscity now benefits from a blazing-fast, modern Magento storefront built to support growth—both technically and commercially.