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