Crisp

A fast, private WordPress suite for building client sites that convert.

Crisp is a commercial WordPress theme and plugin suite from Always Curious. We built it for our own client work because the stacks we were handed taxed every pageview: page builders shipping megabytes of JavaScript, admin screens carrying upsells, themes calling home to a vendor's cloud. The client pays for that in load time, in privacy, and in a site they never fully own.

Everything in the suite answers one question: does this help someone ship a fast site that converts? If it didn't, it didn't make the cut.

Why Crisp

Speed is the default. Every asset earns its place on the page. Integration styles for WooCommerce, LearnDash, The Events Calendar, GiveWP, and the rest load only on requests that actually use them; an integration whose plugin isn't active never registers anything. The Customizer's dynamic CSS is compiled once and cached rather than rebuilt on every request. The theme's own scripts load async in the footer with no dependencies, and navigation automatically drops to an 11 KB file when a site skips sticky headers and scroll effects. Google Fonts can be downloaded once and served from your own domain.

No bloat. The theme is close to fifty single-purpose components. Each one can be removed with the crisp_theme_components filter before it registers a single hook, so the sites you ship carry nothing they don't use. There's no proprietary framework underneath and no page-builder runtime riding along. Site-specific work belongs in a child theme, so what you build stays portable and yours.

No hidden tracking. The only outbound request the theme ever makes is a one-time download of Google Fonts when you tell it to host fonts locally. There is no telemetry, no analytics, no template cloud, and nothing loading from a vendor's CDN. Your sites talk to your server and nothing else. The suite's single regular connection is Crisp Manager asking our own registry for updates, a request that carries your license token and nothing else.

Built for the person who edits the site after launch. That person is rarely a developer, so Crisp keeps them in the block editor they already know: drag-and-drop header and footer builders, global colors and fonts that cascade site-wide, and forms, query loops, and dynamic content as ordinary blocks. Crisp AI drafts sections from your real palette and fonts, because the theme tells the agent what palette slot 3 means instead of letting it guess hex values that look plausible. Every performance decision above serves the same goal: slow pages don't convert.

The Crisp suite

The theme is the foundation. Each plugin adds one capability, and they all share one admin area, one update channel, and one design language.

Under the hood

The theme runs a component architecture: each component implements a two-method interface, autoloads from its own path under inc/components/, and initializes only when its plugin is present. Integration stylesheets are conditionally enqueued per request, each with a crisp_*_css_active filter to force or suppress it. Frontend cleanup (emoji scripts, generator tags, RSD links) is on by default, with an individual filter per behavior. Global styles flow through theme.json and the block editor's native systems, so what you build today keeps working as WordPress evolves.

The codebase is PHP 8.3+ with no legacy compatibility layer, follows WordPress coding standards, escapes all output, and has zero runtime Composer dependencies. Architecture, extension points, local setup, and the release process are documented in DEVELOPER.md.

Accessibility

Crisp carries the accessibility-ready tag and is built to WCAG 2.2 AA. Keyboard-only navigation, NVDA and VoiceOver, and the axe and WAVE checkers run against components as they're developed, and updates go through regression testing so fixes stay fixed. We haven't commissioned a formal WCAG audit, so we don't claim one.

Licensing and updates

Crisp is commercial software. A license covers one site and takes the form of a token for our private package registry at packages.alwayscurious.cloud. Crisp Manager puts that token to work in the standard WordPress Updates screen, so the whole suite updates like any plugin, from the same place. Composer-managed sites can pull alwayscurious/crisp from the registry directly.

Requirements

• WordPress 6.3 or later
• PHP 8.3 or later

Getting started

1. Install and activate the Crisp theme.
2. Add Crisp Blocks for the full block toolkit and header builder.
3. Add Crisp Manager to receive updates in the WordPress dashboard.
4. Build site-specific work in a child theme so Crisp itself stays generic:

/*
Theme Name: My Client Site
Template: crisp
*/

License

GPL-3.0-or-later. The code you run is yours to inspect, modify, and keep. Built by Always Curious.