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Why Hyas?

Hyas is a Node.js web framework for building fast, security-focused websites.

Why choose Hyas over another web framework? 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…

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 Hugo’s build speed with optimizations for production builds. 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.

Security focused

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 adheres as much as possible to MDN’s web security guidelines, and uses e.g. Subresource Integrity and sensible defaults for Security Headers like Content Security Policy. Our goal: Your website should keep up with the latest in web security standards..

Robust and reliable

The Twelve-Factor App is a set of principles that describes a way of making software that, when followed, enables companies to create code that can be released reliably, scaled quickly, and maintained in a consistent and predictable manner.

Hyas adheres as much as possible to The Twelve-Factor App methodology, and uses e.g. npm to explicitly declare and isolate dependencies. Our goal: Your website should follow best practices for building web apps.

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 and APIs as you go.

Hyas comes with everything you need to build a website. Hyas includes file-based routing, asset handling, a build process, bundling, optimizations, data-fetching, and more. You can build great websites without ever reaching outside of Hyas’ core feature set.

If you need more control, you can extend Hyas with a growing number of integrations like SEO, Images, Inline SVG, Tailwind CSS, Bootstrap, and more. Connect your favorite CMS or deploy to your favorite host with just a single command.