WooCommerce Relic Theme

What is Relic Theme?

Relic Theme is a WooCommerce starter theme for developers who want full control over their store’s frontend. It provides a clean, standardized structure for overriding WooCommerce templates, extending core hooks, and building store experiences from scratch.

No blocks. No defaults. No Handlebars. No opinions about your CSS framework or JavaScript stack.

Relic gives you the file structure, the template overrides, and the hook architecture. You bring the design.

Who It’s For

Relic is for development teams building custom WooCommerce stores where performance and control are non-negotiable. If your workflow involves reading WooCommerce source code, overriding template files, and writing custom hook callbacks, this is your starting point.

It is not for store owners looking for a theme they can activate and start selling. There is no demo content, no theme options panel, no drag-and-drop customizer. This is scaffolding for professionals.

Architecture

Template Overrides - Relic ships with a complete set of WooCommerce template overrides organized in the standard woocommerce/ directory. Every template is stripped to its semantic HTML structure with clear comments marking where customization should happen.

Hook Map - A documented hook registration system in functions.php that organizes all add_action and add_filter calls by context: shop loop, single product, cart, checkout, and account. No hunting through random include files to find where a hook is registered.

Asset Pipeline - Minimal CSS and zero JavaScript by default. The theme includes a build configuration for your preferred toolchain (PostCSS, Sass, or Tailwind), but ships nothing opinionated. You start with a blank stylesheet and build only what you need.

No jQuery - Relic removes jQuery from the frontend entirely. WooCommerce’s JavaScript dependencies are re-registered with vanilla JS alternatives where needed, or dequeued when they serve no purpose.

Template Structure

woocommerce/
  archive-product.php
  single-product.php
  content-product.php
  cart/
    cart.php
    cart-empty.php
    mini-cart.php
  checkout/
    form-checkout.php
    form-billing.php
    form-shipping.php
    payment.php
  myaccount/
    my-account.php
    dashboard.php
    orders.php
    form-login.php

Every file is documented with the WooCommerce version it overrides and the hooks available within that template context.

Performance Defaults

Relic removes WooCommerce’s frontend bloat by default:

• Dequeued block styles that load on every page whether blocks are used or not
• Removed default WooCommerce stylesheets so you start from zero, not from overriding
• Disabled cart fragments AJAX on pages that do not display a cart, eliminating the most common WooCommerce performance bottleneck
• Lazy-loaded product images with proper width/height attributes for zero layout shift
• Preconnect hints for payment gateway domains loaded only on checkout

Extending Relic

Relic is designed to be forked or used as a parent theme. The hook map and template structure follow WooCommerce conventions exactly, so any developer familiar with WooCommerce core can navigate the codebase immediately.

For agency teams, Relic serves as the standard starting point across client projects. Same file structure, same conventions, same performance baseline. Every store starts fast and stays maintainable.