LIQUIDLAB Wins Best Performance Improvement at HIVE Germany 2026

On 21 October 2026, at the Pyramide in Mainz, LIQUIDLAB won Best Performance Improvement at HIVE Germany, the ecommerce showcase by Mollie and Hyvä, held the day before Meet Magento Germany.

A jury picked the finalists in each category. Each finalist presented a case on stage, and the people in the room voted for the winner in the event app. We came with Vitacom.

The story we told on stage

Vitacom is a Romanian electronics distributor and retailer, in business since 1991. One Magento installation runs three storefronts: a public store and two private portals, for B2B and export customers, with more than 11,500 products.

When the store came to us, it was already on Magento 2 and Hyvä. Even so, it ran so badly that every page opened with an apology, asking customers to call if they had trouble placing an order. In our first measurement, the server took almost 16 seconds to respond.

We found more than 290 extra modules, on a server with 64 cores and 256 GB of RAM. Rebuilding the search index took 2 hours and 24 minutes. And the store had gone about two years without security patches, with a dozen known holes still open.

Secure, simplify, accelerate

We split the rescue into three phases. Each went live on its own, and we measured the result before starting the next.

• Secure: we rebuilt the infrastructure around what Magento actually needs, installed the missing patches and closed the exposed test site. The store was already twice as fast, on 16 cores instead of 64.
• Simplify: several extensions were competing over search, merchandising, brands and categories. We replaced them with ElasticSuite and removed 32 modules, about 180 over the whole project. The search index now rebuilds in 1 minute 45 seconds instead of 2 hours 24 minutes.
• Accelerate: we rolled out Liquid Framework, our Hyvä accelerator, together with Hyvä Checkout.

The result: server response went from almost 16 seconds to 12 milliseconds, about 1,300 times faster, with a Lighthouse performance score of 100. The store now runs on 8 cores instead of 64, eight times less hardware. Same Magento, same Hyvä. The full story is in the Vitacom case study.

The two response times come from different pages, so read them as the size of the change, not as a lab benchmark. We closed with the line that sums up the whole case: Hyvä was never the problem.

Thank you

To the Vitacom team, for trusting us with a store their business depends on every day. To Hyvä and Mollie, for building a stage where agencies show real work. To the other finalists, for two strong cases in the same category. And to everyone in the room who voted.

To the LIQUIDLAB team: this one is yours.

What it means for us

Romania's first full-service Hyvä agency now holds an international award for performance.

For merchants, the lesson from Vitacom is the one we took to Mainz: a slow Magento store rarely needs a new platform. It needs the work underneath done properly.

If your Magento store is slow, or your Hyvä store is not as fast as it should be, book a free strategy call and we will look at it together.