Mediahuis engaged PHPro in 2016 for the implementation of Magento 2, leading to the development of webshops for their leading news brands such as Het Nieuwsblad, Het Belang van Limburg, De Standaard, and Gazet van Antwerpen.

Successfully completing this initial project led to a long-term partnership between PHPro and Mediahuis. Over the years, PHPro has contributed to various new projects that align with Mediahuis’ growth strategy and evolving needs.

These projects highlight Mediahuis' ambition to strengthen its digital presence and offer an optimal user experience for its customers. You can check out their thriving webshops here:

• https://shop.nieuwsblad.be/
• https://shop.hbvl.be/
• https://shop.standaard.be/
• https://shop.gva.be/

The most recent requests from Mediahuis to PHPro included the following new projects:

• Further optimization of speed and performance for their website
• Introduction of new product categories: travel and bicycle products
• A new homepage where even non-technical staff can add content
• In-depth optimization of general UX guidelines for a better customer experience

Optimized Website Performance

Hyvä is known as an excellent solution for creating fast webshops. We checked the performance of the webshop before and after the implementation, and the results speak for themselves:

• Performance: Overall speed and responsiveness increased from 79% to 99%.
• Structure: The underlying structure and organization of the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code were initially at 60% and improved to 92%.
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): The load time of the largest image or content block was initially 2.2s. We optimized this to 418ms.
• Total Blocking Time (TBT): A low TBT is important for good interactivity on your website. We reduced this from 226ms to 114ms.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This metric reflects how much page elements can unexpectedly shift during loading. We reduced this from 0.06 to 0.

An added bonus of the improved performance is that we saw a substantial increase in organic traffic to their website:

• Nieuwsblad: +27%
• De Standaard: +14%
• Het Belang van Limburg: +8%
• Gazet van Antwerpen: +18%

Ready-Made Front-End Components

Another reason we chose Hyvä was the simple process of working with "fallback themes." A fallback theme refers to a solution that allows you to refresh parts of your website without needing to update everything at once. When using a fallback theme, your web platform automatically reverts to the previous design theme when it can't find a newly defined style for the specific page. This allows you to gradually change websites.

With the Hyvä theme, we provided new, ready-made custom components that could be used in the webshop banners. Thanks to these components, non-technical staff can now also adjust shop banners. They can easily highlight new features or products without needing help from a developer.

New Product Categories for the Webshop

We added two new product categories to Mediahuis' webshops: one for the "Travel" category and another for "Bikes."

• Travel: Employees can easily create new travel packages on the website without needing any coding knowledge.
• Bikes: We provided the right filters and specifications so employees can easily offer bikes and accessories on the webshop, without requiring technical expertise.