Relaunching Police Supplies with Hyvä

Police Supplies has provided specialist equipment and uniforms to UK police forces, ambulance services, fire brigades, and security officers for three decades.

And, just as we rely on public services to be reliable and responsive, eCommerce customers expect the same. That’s why Police Supplies has trusted Dock with their website for years.

However, their Magento website had begun to show its age. Performance was dropping, the frontend had become bloated, and it was all looking a little outdated. Kind of like Danny Glover’s ageing detective in Lethal Weapon.

It was time for us to make the site faster, cleaner, and easier to use. For that, we’d need to rebuild it on stronger foundations. 

​

Improving performance with Hyvä

‍

It’s not unusual for older Magento sites to experience performance issues. So, it wasn’t surprising that Police Supplies’ website had slowed to the point where it affected both users and our ability to improve the site.

Police Supplies needed a solution that would improve the customer experience and make the platform easier for our team to maintain. There was no doubt in our minds that Hyvä was the best choice. The theme is now the go-to for modern Magento builds, and would allow us to tackle the performance and complexity issues that plague Magento’s default setup.

Without going into the technical details, Magento 2 can drive developers nuts. Thankfully, Hyvä simplifies Magento’s frontend. Their lightweight, easy-to-use technologies help us turn websites around more quickly, with cleaner code that dramatically improves site speed.

Plus, we’d already used Hyvä successfully on larger Magento stores like Killer Ink, so it made sense to recommend it for Police Supplies.

​

The benefits of Hyvä technology

‍

The new Police Supplies website uses two of Hyva’s out-of-the-box technologies: Tailwind CSS and Alpine.js.

Tailwind helps developers quickly create consistent, responsive designs without relying on complicated style sheets. Instead of managing lots of custom styles, Tailwind offers an understandable, reusable system that keeps the frontend light and manageable.

For this project, we turned key design elements into reusable values in Tailwind’s setup, enabling faster development, consistent styling, and fewer last-minute fixes.

​Alpine.js manages the site’s interactive features, like dynamic updates and user interface behaviour, without the extra weight of larger frameworks. So, instead of defining step-by-step instructions for a program, you simply provide the end result, and the framework handles the heavy lifting under the hood.

Compared to Magento’s default tools, Alpine is faster, simpler, and uses fewer resources.

Together, these technologies make the site fast and responsive for users, while keeping the backend up to scratch.

​

Affordable impact

​

Police Supplies has a relatively tight budget for this project. So, instead of running our usual brand workshops, user testing, and content strategy sessions, we focused firmly on performance and efficiency.

This meant keeping the design close to Hyvä’s default frontend, allowing us to build quickly and optimise speed, usability, and long-term maintainability.

These technical choices allowed us to finish the project much faster than a typical Magento build, while still delivering a genuine upgrade to the client.

​By dividing the work into manageable tasks and checking progress in a staging environment before showing it to Police Supplies, we made testing and feedback simple. And, even with a lean build, clear communication and shared priorities helped keep the project on track throughout.

Although we’re still collecting performance data, the improvement is already noticeable in day-to-day use. The new site feels faster, cleaner, and more responsive, while the simpler frontend makes ongoing development easier and more affordable.

Police Supplies now has a dependable platform that does its job properly. Just like the people it’s built for.

‍