I guess this could be the key question every merchant will ask themselves when Hyvä comes up. Since Hyvä is predomintly a theme, it's often been the time for merchants will incorporate UX improvements and many other changes. It could be a rebuild, replatform etc. 

A good chunk of our data is more valid since most of our Hyvä builds in 2023 were 'retrofit' projects, like-for-like Luma > Hyvä swap-out so we could deliver faster project builds and greater confidence when we viewed the data 12 months later.

That time is now!!

Every business is different. Not only that, the impact of Hyvä depends heavily on where you sit with your competitors. For example, if you sell in a sector where your competitors are already investing in ensuring their sites are considered healthy where Core Web Vitals are concerned, then it's possible you are experiencing a decline in the SERPs since your competitors are investing earlier. 

One thing is clear, Google has confirmed that page experience signals, including Core Web Vitals, are a ranking factor. We have surveyed 37 websites evenly mixed with Hyvä & Luma themes. 

We decided to use Google Search Console because likely that data is available for old and new customers over the greatest time-period. 

Whilst we had Clicks, Impressions and Average Click-Through-Rate available, we decided to use the Average Position metric. They all tend to move with each other in either direction so this just seemed a sensible metric.

With Average Position in Google Search Console, you can monitor the Average Position of a whole website. To account for any seasonal change and give what we hoped was the most valuable data, we opted for the last 3 months Average position compared to the same period in the previous year.

Pictured on the right is a typical small business on Hyvä. Solid gains in organic traffic over the previous 12 months with the only risks we envisage being poor project delivery or other market factors.

We profiled 37 websites. We recorded the Average Positions in the last 3 months and compared them to the same period 12 months ago. We then separated the data to show the sites on Luma so we could compare them against the sites on Hyvä.

The results were pretty clear!

Worth noting at this time is that the gains and losses are continuing over time, Ie we are seeing many Luma-based websites continue a steady decline whilst the opposite is true for merchants on Hyvä.

It ain't all bad, but the trends are worsening.

Since we are obviously profiling websites whose rankings and competition in SERPs relate to their own industry sector and competition, we obviously don't expect to see corrolation between the 2 key metrics we are showing. However what is clear is that as these trends continue, Hyvä Themes is clearly providing a solid gain and over 50% of sites on Luma are facing an increasing decline which is being compounded over time.