WordPress Developer Intern

**Role:** Full-Stack WordPress Developer Intern **Company:** The Urbanite Bengaluru **Location:** Remote / Hybrid (Bengaluru) **Stipend:** Disclosed upon application **About The Urbanite** *The Urbanite* is a city centric digital publication dedicated to urban culture, arts, lifestyle, dining, city narratives, and contemporary voices. We publish long-form essays, creative features, and curated urban guides. We are actively seeking a focused, resourceful **WordPress Developer Intern** to step in, audit, fix, and upgrade our existing architecture. It is a hands-on technical role focused on solving real-world platform bugs, elevating reader UX, and supercharging site performance. **The Mission** You will be responsible for taking our existing live WordPress site and turning it into a polished, high-performance digital publication. You will work within a dedicated staging environment to debug legacy issues, modernize templates, and streamline our editorial tools. **Key Responsibilities:** **Debug & Clean Up Existing Layouts:** * Resolve taxonomy, query loop, and category feed bugs across the homepage and topic archives. * Audit active plugins: deactivate, remove, or replace bloated, slow, or redundant plugins with clean code solutions **Modernize the Reader Experience (Front-End / UI):** * Upgrade the single-article template to match an international editorial standard (implement drop caps, styled pull-quotes, estimated reading times, author cards, and floating social share docks). * Refine mobile responsiveness, ensuring flawless layout scaling, legible typography, and intuitive mobile drawer navigation. **Performance Tuning & Core Web Vitals:** * Set up automated media conversion (WebP/AVIF) and responsive image sizing to handle high-resolution lifestyle photography without performance penalties. * Configure effective page and object caching (Cloudflare, LiteSpeed, or WP Rocket) to achieve sub-1.5s load times on mobile. **Technical SEO & Metadata Health:** * Implement clean News Article and Article JSON-LD structured data. * Ensure Open Graph and Twitter Card metadata correctly generate rich previews across social platforms and messaging apps. **Editorial Enablement:** * Configure custom Gutenberg block styles so our editors can format narrative features cleanly without needing custom code. **Requirements & Core Competencies** * **Troubleshooting Mindset:** Comfortable in inspecting, debugging, and improving existing WordPress themes and codebases rather than only building from scratch. * **WordPress Core Knowledge:** Solid understanding of the WordPress template hierarchy, child themes, functions.php, and standard hooks (actions & filters). * **Front-End Fundamentals:** Clean, semantic HTML5, modern responsive CSS (Flexbox/Grid), and vanilla JavaScript. * **Gutenberg / FSE Fluency:** Familiarity with the modern WordPress block editor, block styling, and block patterns. * **Performance Basics:** Working knowledge of what impacts mobile PageSpeed (render-blocking scripts, uncompressed media, layout shifts). * **Discipline:** Comfort working strictly within a staging environment and using backup routines before applying changes. **Nice-to-Have** * Prior experience managing, debugging, or writing for an online magazine, blog, or newsroom. * Experience configuring CDN edge caching (e.g., Cloudflare APO) or server caching. * Basic understanding of Google Search Console and schema markup. * Familiarity with newsletter/email capture integrations (Substack, Mailchimp, Brevo). **How to Apply** Please share: * Your resume / LinkedIn profile. * Links to 1–2 WordPress sites you’ve built, fixed, or customized (or your GitHub profile). Pay: Up to ₹5,000.00 per month Application Question(s): * Please visit our live site at theurbanite.in on desktop or mobile. Identify 1–2 visible layout or technical bugs you notice, and briefly state how you would fix them. * Please share a link to your GitHub, portfolio, or 1–2 live WordPress websites you have built, customized, or debugged. Work Location: In person