The Sidemoney Company.

Moderno is the foundation. The brand happens on top, in the templates, the cart, the editorial pacing, the photography frames.

Sidemoney runs on WordPress + WooCommerce + Moderno, but you’d never know it from the front end. Moderno is the stable base, a well-built WooCommerce theme that handles the unsexy plumbing (product schema, cart logic, checkout flow, payment integrations) the way it should be handled. On top of that base sits a layer of custom page templates, custom commerce treatments, custom hooks, custom components, the layer where the brand actually lives.

The reason for this split isn’t ideology, it’s arithmetic. Building the plumbing from scratch is a year of work for no brand-visible payoff. Buying a theme and stopping there gives away the brand to a vendor. The middle path (theme as foundation, brand as the layer customers actually see) gives you both: a battle-tested commerce engine underneath, and a storefront that looks like nothing else on top.

This is how I work in general, take a strong theme as scaffolding, use its functionality (commerce hooks, product schema, cart logic, plumbing) and almost none of its built-in design sets, then build the layouts, components, and brand surface fresh on top. Sidemoney is that approach pushed as far as it goes on WordPress before the Therum OS migration takes it further.

The next version migrates onto Therum OS, the CMS-agnostic operating layer I’m building (separate case study in this portfolio). Sidemoney becomes the first commercial deployment of Therum’s e-commerce surface. Whatever a serious apparel brand asks of the platform (performance, brand-as-system, plugin freedom, content portability) gets battle-tested here first.

Lean build, just a denser toolkit. A handful of these plugins are doing the heavy lifting that keeps a one-person shop shipping at this pace. The rest are commerce, SEO, and security tax, necessary, but not the story.

• Perfmatters: strips WordPress bloat at the source. Disables unused REST endpoints, drops jQuery where it isn’t needed, kills emojis and embeds, defers JS, surgical per-page script control.
• LiteSpeed Cache: page + object cache tuned per surface. Storefront pages cached hard; account, cart, checkout bypassed. First visit hits origin, everything after hits cache.
• ShortPixel: WebP every uploaded image at every responsive size, lossless on the assets that need to stay sharp. No manual export pipeline.
• WPCode + Code Snippets: site-wide PHP / JS without theme hacks or child-theme overhead. Snippets versioned in source, deployed from the dashboard, survive theme updates.
• ACF + Meta Box: custom data on any post type without bespoke schema. The brand layer can hang its own fields off products and pages without touching plugin code.
• CTX Feed: auto-pushes the catalog to Google Shopping, Foot Locker, Facebook, Instagram. Distribution surface without the manual export-CSV-and-pray loop.

Every plugin in the stack is one more thing to watch on update day, one more attack surface, one more potential hook collision. Curation is the discipline, every slot earns its place or gets pulled. Therum OS is where most of them get absorbed into the platform itself.

WordPress can be one of the fastest commerce platforms in the world or one of the slowest, the difference is whether someone is actively tuning it. Sidemoney gets tuned across four layers:

Cache. Page-level HTML cached at the server via LiteSpeed, object cache for repeat DB queries, browser cache headers set aggressively for static assets. Edge cache rules tuned per surface, storefront pages cached hard, account and cart pages never cached, checkout bypassed entirely.

Database. WordPress’s MySQL bloats if you let it. Sidemoney’s gets active management: autoload table kept lean, product meta indexed for the specific queries Woo runs at scale, post revisions limited, orphaned meta swept. A clean database means fast queries means fast pages.

Edge. Cloudflare sits in front of everything, static assets cached worldwide, Brotli compression, HTTP/3, DDoS protection, smart routing. The browser asks Cloudflare first; the origin only gets touched for dynamic content.

Code. Perfmatters strips bloat, ShortPixel compresses every image to WebP, and custom code handles the rest, conditional asset loading, critical CSS inlined for above-the-fold render, custom queries replacing Woo’s heavy product loops on pages where the full machinery isn’t needed.

The Sidemoney site is Therum OS’s proof of work. Whatever a serious apparel brand asks of the platform, this is where it gets answered first, under real traffic, with real orders, with a brand that already has its own gravity.