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Why Hyas?

Hyas is a web framework designed for speed, security, and SEO — all powered by Hugo and npm. With Hyas, it’s super easy to build content-driven websites — like blogs, marketing, and e-commerce — that are production-ready out of the box. If you need a website that loads fast, is max secure, and has great SEO, then Hyas is for you.

Features

Hyas is an all-in-one web framework. It includes everything you need to create a website, built-in. There is also a growing number of different integrations and themes available to customize a project to your exact use case and needs.

Some highlights include:

  • Site generator: Leverage the speed and flexibility of Hugo.
  • Dependencies: Explicitly declare and isolate dependencies with npm.
  • Customizable: Tailwind, Images, and a growing number of integrations to choose from.
  • Themable: Themes for blogs, portfolios, documentation, landing pages, and more.

Design Principles

Here are five core design principles to help explain why we built Hyas, the problems that it exists to solve, and why Hyas may be the best choice for your project or team.

Hyas is…

  • Solid architecture: Hyas helps you build scalable and maintainable websites.
  • Fast by default: It should be impossible to build a slow website with Hyas.
  • Maximum secure: Your website should keep up with the latest in web security standards.
  • Easy to use: You don’t need to be an expert to build something with Hyas.
  • Developer-focused: You should have the resources you need to be successful.

Solid architecture

Hyas leverages The Twelve-Factor App methodology to help you build scalable and maintainable websites. The Twelve-Factor App describes many well-tested architectural patterns and best practices for software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. When apps are deployed to the web, they can be created with portability and resilience thanks to these best practices.

It was created by engineers at Heroku, a cloud platform-as-a-service company, around 2011. Adam Wiggins, a co-founder of Heroku, played a significant role in articulating and promoting these principles. This framework continues to be influential, aiding in designing and deploying scalable and maintainable software applications.

Fast by default

Good performance is always important, but it is especially critical for content-focused websites. It has been well-proven that poor performance loses you engagement, conversions, and money. For example:

  • Every 100ms faster → 1% more conversions (Mobify, earning +$380,000/yr)
  • 50% faster → 12% more sales (AutoAnything)
  • 20% faster → 10% more conversions (Furniture Village)
  • 40% faster → 15% more sign-ups (Pinterest)
  • 850ms faster → 7% more conversions (COOK)
  • Every 1 second slower → 10% fewer users (BBC)

In many web frameworks, it is easy to build a website that looks great during development only to load painfully slow once deployed. JavaScript is often the culprit, since users’ phones and lower-powered devices rarely match the speed of a developer’s laptop.

Hyas’ magic is in how it combines the solid architecture described above with optimizations for production builds and tools like Quicklink. The result is amazing web performance for every website, out of the box. Our goal: It should be nearly impossible to build a slow website with Hyas.

Maximum secure

With great regularity, we hear about websites becoming unavailable due to denial of service attacks, or displaying modified (and often damaging) information on their homepages. In other high-profile cases, millions of passwords, email addresses, and credit card details have been leaked into the public domain, exposing website users to both personal embarrassment and financial risk.

The purpose of website security is to prevent these (or any) sorts of attacks. The more formal definition of website security is the act/practice of protecting websites from unauthorized access, use, modification, destruction, or disruption.

Effective website security requires design effort across the whole of the website: in your web application, the configuration of the web server, your policies for creating and renewing passwords, and the client-side code.

Hyas helps you build a maximum secure website by combining MDN’s web security guidelines with sensible defaults that you can use out of the box. Our goal: Your website should keep up with the latest in web security standards..

Easy to use

Hyas’ goal is to be accessible to every web developer. Hyas was designed to feel familiar and approachable regardless of skill level or past experience with web development.

We designed Hyas to remove as much “required complexity” as possible from the developer experience, especially as you onboard for the first time. You can build a “Hello World” example website in Hyas with just HTML and CSS. Then, when you need to build something more powerful, you can incrementally reach for new features as you go.

Developer-focused

We strongly believe that Hyas is only a successful project if people love using it. Hyas has everything you need to support you as you build with Hyas.

Hyas invests in developer tools like a great CLI experience from the moment you open your terminal and documentation actively maintained by community contributors.

Our welcoming, respectful, inclusive community on Discussions is ready to provide support, motivation, and encouragement. Open a Support thread to get help with your project. Visit our dedicated Showcase category for sharing your Hyas sites, blog posts, videos, and even work-in-progress for safe feedback and constructive criticism.

As an open-source project, we welcome contributions of all types and sizes from community members of all experience levels. You are invited to join in roadmap discussions to shape the future of Hyas, and we hope you’ll contribute fixes and features to the core codebase, docs, and other projects.