Rihards Ratke

Every Hyvä build tends to start the same way: a long checklist of foundational work before any client-specific value gets created - styling every My Account page, handling all PLP display modes, wiring up checkout flows, replacing window.confirm with proper modals, building out wishlist, review, and order pages. Most teams rebuild some version of this list on every project.

This talk looks at what that repeated work actually costs, and what happens when you treat the baseline as a solved problem instead. We'll walk through the common Hyvä starting checklist, where the time really goes, and the trade-offs of working from a maintained child theme - keeping pace with upstream releases, code quality and standards, documentation, and whether an accelerated starting point ends up constraining design.

Examples from real storefronts show how different the end results can look from a shared foundation, backed by real user results from live stores: measured changes in conversion, revenue, and returning customers across different markets.