From Limburgia Vlaai to Patisserie Limburgia

Limburgia was founded in 1901 and was acquired by the current owner, the De Haas family, in 1954. A proud and wonderful 120-year-old family business!

Limburgia has decided to undergo a name change from Limburgia Vlaai to Patisserie Limburgia. This included an update of the corporate identity and a new design for the shop. The corporate identity was developed by an external agency and we were responsible for the redesign of the shop!

Goals

The existing Magento 2 shop was running on a third-party theme, which caused the necessary problems. New features were difficult to build in because of the poor quality of the theme, and Magento upgrades therefore took a long time to implement.

Moreover, with the announcement of Google's Core Web Vitals, it became clear that this needed to receive the greatest attention in order to maintain high organic Google positions on key keywords. The three most important metrics for Core Web Vitals are as follows:

• Largest Contentful Paint
• First Input Delay
• Cumulative Layout Shift

With many third-party themes, it is very difficult to get these values into the green zone. Even if it succeeds today, it is no longer a scalable situation. With a change from Google, you may have to jump through all the hoops again to just meet the Web Vitals.

Even Magento 2's own Luma theme doesn't come close to what Google will require as of May 2021. Our goal was to achieve Lighthouse scores above 95 points on mobile.

So concretely, we formulated 3 goals:

• Core web vitals endured (with a long-term solution)
• Performance scores on desktop AND mobile of above 95
• Improved development flow resulting in long-term cost savings

Hyvä

We therefore chose to build Limburgia's redesign on Hyvä, a Magento theme built completely from the ground up to achieve high scores on the Core Web Vitals. Hyvä allowed us not only to achieve these high scores, but also to greatly reduce the complexity of the frontend, thus not only increasing the development speed but, not unimportantly, the developers' job satisfaction as well!

With Hyvä, the webshop is easier to maintain and new features can be added faster. So it lends itself perfectly to larger webshops, because the more customization, the more hours can be saved with Hyvä compared to other Magento themes.

Headless CMS integration with Prismic and Magento

For this project, we also chose to implement the headless CMS Prismic for the landing pages, content pages, USPs, callouts and blogs. You can read more about our Prismic and Magento integration here.

Results achieved

Tricky with these comparisons is always the test environment used. In the past, we have sometimes made the mistake of using the developer's computer & the internet in our office as a benchmark for a PWA. But every computer and internet connection is different. At the time of writing, we also cannot use the field data from Google (which is strictly speaking the most objective), because this is based on 28 days, and the new shop has only been live for a few days.

Fortunately, Chrome has a solution for this. Using network & CPU throttling, it simulates a standard computer and Internet connection. For these tests, we set the Internet connection speed to Fast 3G. We assume that a large portion of customers have access to 4G or faster (WiFi), so testing on 3G should be fine. We set the laptop's CPU to 4x slower than average.

Then on desktop we get the following score:

And the next score on mobile:

New functionalities

Since we were building a new frontend anyway, a lot of work was also done in the background. The Magento installation was upgraded, unused modules were removed and the entire installation was cleaned up. It is now also possible for the customer to customize the individual store page of the 40-plus stores, as well as their opening hours.

In fact, in the checkout you can choose a store to make the delivery, or where the order can be picked up. The closest opened store is preselected based on the entered zip code.

Optimized checkout

For the checkout, we decided to replace Magento's default checkout with a React-based checkout. This gives us more flexibility in adding functionality, such as store selection and delivery/pickup date functionality. In addition, this checkout is many times faster than the standard Magento checkout.

Enhanced middleware linkage

Limburgia not only supplies consumers, but also other companies through a number of B2B shops. The orders from all shops and from the cash registers in the physical stores are merged into a middleware system, which in turn transfers the orders to the ERP in the bakery. We made this middleware link suitable for Magento 2 and we added synchronization functionalities to make the systems more compatible with each other.

Moving to Hypernode

To secure the uptime and speed of the shop, we chose to move the shop to the Hypernode platform. We have been hosting all our customers at Hypernode for many years to our complete satisfaction and this move also went amazingly smoothly.