A lightweight theme built for Interlinker
Project: An autonomous WordPress publishing and management system
I have replaced the paid theme with Interlinker Journalist, a theme I can control alongside the publishing and management plugin. It is a slight detour from the plugin itself, but the two now have a much closer relationship.
The previous theme was flexible, but that flexibility came with weight and made targeted changes awkward. Editing a third-party theme directly risks losing changes on update, while adding customisations through WordPress introduced another layer to maintain. With my own theme I can change the templates, CSS and JavaScript directly and remove features I do not need.
Theme and plugin working together
The theme has dedicated templates for the plugin’s question-and-answer pages, so those pages can be rendered as part of the theme rather than relying on content filters to inject their layout. It also uses Interlinker’s related-content functions where available. Owning both sides gives me a clearer route to consistent styling and reduces the chance of clashes with a general-purpose theme.
The same control helps with SEO: the plugin manages the information and the theme can render the site around it with that integration in mind. This has made it easier to improve and validate the output as a whole.
Performance and next steps
In my current Google performance checks, the uncached page is now green across the board. That is a substantial improvement, although I have not included a before-and-after measurement here. Cached pages should benefit too; I still need to measure them separately. Network latency may now be a more significant constraint than rendering, but that is a hypothesis to investigate rather than a conclusion.
This decision also moves the wider project towards a site I can maintain with my own theme and plugins. The next step is to continue measuring the real delivery path and refine the integration as the publishing and Q&A features develop.