Oxygen — clean output, no theme overhead.
Oxygen for teams who want builder velocity without a parent theme. Clean HTML output, custom components, design-first controls, and performance that holds under load.
Output
Components
Approach
Performance
What is Oxygen Builder development?
Oxygen Builder development is the practice of building WordPress sites in Oxygen — a builder with no theme that gives developers complete control over markup, classes, and architecture. Oxygen rewards engineering discipline and is rarely the right tool for non-developer teams.
Why Oxygen
Oxygen replaces the theme; the trade-off is real and worth understanding.
Oxygen disables your active WordPress theme entirely and renders pages from its own template system. The output is clean, the performance is good, and the editor is precise. The trade-off is that Oxygen IS the theme — switching away later means a real migration. Worth doing when the team will commit; worth talking through honestly when they're not sure.
What we hear most
When Oxygen is the right call.
You want builder velocity without theme bloat
Premium themes ship features you'll never use. Oxygen ships none — you build the templates from blocks. Performance starts cleaner.
Designer-developer team
Oxygen's controls are CSS-flavored. The team has a developer eye and prefers a builder that doesn't abstract too far.
Custom components are common
You need custom dynamic components frequently. Oxygen's element API is straightforward to extend.
Lean stack discipline
Plugin sprawl is a stated concern. Oxygen reduces the surface area: no parent theme, fewer plugins to wire together.
Mature commitment
The team understands and accepts that Oxygen replaces the theme. Switching later is a migration, not a re-skin.
What we deliver
What ships in a Haxtiv Oxygen engagement.
A clean Oxygen build with custom components, CWV targets, and the documentation to live with it.
Foundations
- Oxygen template system mapped to your IA
- Global classes and design tokens
- Custom Oxygen components for bespoke functionality
- Editor controls scoped to what should change
- Documented Oxygen conventions in the repo
Performance
- Lean default output preserved (no wrapper soup)
- Critical CSS, font subsetting, fetchpriority on LCP
- LCP < 1.8s, CLS < 0.05, INP < 130ms targets
- Image policy: AVIF/WebP, srcset, sizes, dimensions
- Real-user CWV monitoring for 30 days post-launch
SEO
- Schema (Organization, Article, FAQ, Service, BreadcrumbList)
- Heading-order discipline enforced in templates
- Indexation hygiene (canonicals, sitemaps, robots)
- OG and Twitter meta with dynamic per-page imagery
- Internal-link plan for cornerstone pages
Hand-off
- Loom-led walkthroughs for the team
- Custom components documented
- Recovery plan in case Oxygen ever needs migrating away
- 30 days of post-launch support included
- Optional retainer for new templates and components
Process
How this service runs end to end
The same six-step shape we use across every Haxtiv project — adapted to the specifics of this scope.
01
Discover
Audit, intent, and the part nobody is saying out loud
We open with a working session — not a deck. We pull analytics, crawl the existing site, audit the brand, and interview the people closest to revenue. We surface the friction inside the team, not just the friction on the screen.
02
Define
Sitemap, story, and the metrics that actually matter
We define the audience journeys, the commercial pages we are willing to defend, the SEO architecture, and the measurable outcomes. You get a shape of the project that survives feedback because it was built on evidence.
03
Design
Editorial system, art-directed, never templated
Type, grid, motion, and tone built as a system. We design the hero, the long pages, the unloved corners, and the empty states. Every screen looks like it belongs to the same studio. Nothing is parked for later.
04
Build
Production code your team can keep
WordPress, Shopify, or page builder — we build clean, accessible, performant, and documented. Component-led, naming you'll recognize next year, and a changelog your in-house team can read.
05
Launch
Migration without losing rankings or sleep
Pre-launch crawl, redirect map, schema and metadata cutover, performance baseline, and a launch playbook. We run the deploy with you, not at you.
06
Grow
Care plan, CRO sprints, and quiet improvements
We stay involved. Monthly performance reports, security and core updates, and CRO sprints that compound. The site gets better the longer you keep us.
What this looks like in production
Numbers we earn, not numbers we round up.
Sites shipped
across 27 countries
Studio hours
delivered since 2019
Avg conversion lift
post-redesign clients
Client retention
into year two
In their words
Senior teams who chose us.
Haxtiv replatformed our marketing site without losing a single ranking. We saw organic leads up 38% inside the first quarter and the editorial team finally has a layout system they don't fight.
Mara Iglesias
VP Marketing · Lumenwave Health
Headless WordPress redesign
Our previous Shopify build was a Frankenstein of apps. The Haxtiv team simplified the stack, rebuilt the PDP and CRO patterns, and our store is faster and more profitable than it has ever been.
Daniel Korver
Founder · Northbound Goods
Shopify Plus rebuild
Frequently asked
Answers worth asking for.
Don't see the question you're holding? Send it to [email protected] and we'll answer the same day.
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Where to go next
Bricks builder
Closest peer.
Page builder experts
Cross-builder expertise.
Custom WordPress development
Hand-coded option.
Elementor development
More conventional builder.
Breakdance builder
From Oxygen's makers.
WordPress development
Top-line WP service.
WordPress speed optimization
Real-world CWV.
WordPress technical SEO
Architecture, schema, linking.
Start here
Brief us on an Oxygen build that has to stay lean.
30-minute call. We'll review the brief and share a fixed quote.