By Cristian Daron
Themes drift. Every urgent fix, every app trial and every page-builder block leaves something behind, and on a store running continuous tests the drift is fast. The theme I audited on the Puur Smile account had been through all of it.
What I found
Hardcoded IDs inside template logic. Page-builder blocks carrying their own inline HTML and scripts. The same JavaScript included more than once. Scripts that nothing referenced any more. None of it broke the store outright, and all of it cost load time.
Document before you delete
On a live store, the dangerous part of a cleanup is the deleting. So I documented what each piece did before touching it: where it was included, what depended on it, and what would change if it went. Only then did I remove what was dead, and I tracked what stayed and why, so the next person would not have to repeat the audit.
The straightforward gains
Once the documentation existed, removing duplicate includes and dead scripts was the easy part. Converting images to WebP was the other plain win.
Stopping the drift
A clean theme does not stay clean on its own. I agreed a set of coding standards with the team, so new work followed the same conventions and the theme would not drift back to where it started.
A checklist for your own theme
Search the theme for hardcoded IDs. List every script include and look for the same file twice. For each script, find what uses it; if nothing does, it is a candidate to remove. Check page-builder blocks for inline code. Then write the rules down, because the audit only pays off if the next change follows them.