Magento Hyvä Theme & Hyvä Checkout for Charles Bentley

Founded in 1860 as a family-run brush manufacturer based in Loughborough, Charles Bentley provides a vast catalogue ranging from outdoor furniture to essential household items. Charlesbentley.com is a Magento Open-source eCommerce website, supplying premium home, garden and leisure products.

Charles Bentley wanted to improve their site to increase conversions and present a modern online presence. They turned to us for a full site redesign, leveraging Magento Hyvä Theme for superior performance and Hyvä Checkout for seamless user experience, integrated with a new payment provider. We delivered a refreshed, high-speed storefront that enhances navigation, accelerates conversions, and created the base to build upon for future functionality.

Charles Bentley had recently joined our Support Service and wanted to enhance their website to drive higher conversions and sales in the years ahead. Their existing site was built on the Luma theme, an older framework that relies on outdated technologies, resulting in slower performance and a less efficient foundation for ongoing development.

Hyvä, introduced in 2021, is a modern Magento theme designed from the ground up with performance as a core priority. Its lightweight architecture minimises server resource usage and delivers strong performance out of the box. This reduces the need for extensive manual optimisation while also providing a cleaner, more flexible foundation for future development, making it easier for Charles Bentley to scale and evolve their website in line with their roadmap.

Along with the Hyvä Theme, we also updated Charles Bentley’s Checkout to use Hyvä Checkout - similar to the theme, Hyvä Checkout was built from the ground up with a focus on performance, taking inspiration from Shopify’s ‘one page’ checkout which has become the industry leader in customer conversions.

UX Design

We partnered with Charles Bentley to create a refreshed website design, working alongside our in-house UX experts. This delivered visually engaging, customer-focused designs across key pages, including homepage, category, and product. We started with wireframes to map out structure and layout, then moved into high fidelity Figma designs. Featuring actual imagery and copy, stakeholders could clearly visualise the final design ahead of development.

Development

We built the site using Hyvä, a performance-focused theme that enables a faster, more modern frontend. Following development, our design team carried out QA to ensure the build aligned closely with the approved designs. Alongside the frontend, we implemented additional functionality, such as; Hyvä Checkout, a more bespoke mega menu and product pre-order options, to support Charles Bentley’s goals of expanding their customer base and improving conversions. Extensive testing was then conducted by both teams to identify any issues and confirm all features worked as intended ahead of launch.

Hyva Checkout

We implemented Hyvä Checkout to deliver a faster, more seamless experience for customers. Built from the ground up with performance in mind, it offers a significant improvement over the standard Luma-based Magento checkout. Alongside this, we integrated and refined existing checkout modules, including postcode lookup and custom delivery messaging. These enhancements ensured customers had clear, accurate information throughout the checkout process.

Mollie - Payment Provider

During checkout testing, we identified slow response times from Charles Bentley’s existing payment provider, with key data such as delivery and payment options taking longer than expected to load. To benchmark performance, we integrated the Mollie sandbox and compared results, finding a significant improvement, reducing response times from around 6 seconds to just 2 seconds.

Following these findings, Charles Bentley engaged with Mollie, and after onboarding, we successfully implemented the new payment solution following the launch of the Hyvä Theme based site and Hyvä Checkout.

Launch

As part of our launch process, we carried out a full dry run to minimise risk and reduce potential downtime on launch day. This involved replicating the production environment and following the exact steps planned for go-live. The dry run allowed us to identify and resolve issues in advance, while giving a clear view of the tasks required on the day. We also created a detailed launch plan, acting as a checklist to ensure everything from analytics to content, was in place for a smooth, efficient migration.

The move to Hyvä delivered a significant performance uplift, achieving an average increase of 55.9% across both desktop and mobile devices. Compared to the traditional Luma based build, Hyvä’s lightweight architecture enabled faster load times, improved responsiveness, and a smoother overall user experience.

These performance gains, combined with an optimised checkout and enhanced backend functionality, have positioned Charles Bentley for improved customer engagement and higher conversion rates. The project demonstrates the clear advantages of modernising Magento builds with a performance-first approach.