Konstruktion 32 – Construction Architecture WordPress Theme

So, I just wrapped up a migration for a mid-sized roofing contractor. Their old site was a 2016 WPBakery nightmare that took 8 seconds to load, and the client was breathing down my neck for a modern redesign. I grabbed the Konstruktion theme hoping for a quick turnaround. Spoiler: it wasn’t completely painless, but we got there. Here are my raw thoughts after wrestling with it for a week.

The Good, The Bad, and The DOM Size

First thing I did after installing Konstruktion was pop open Chrome DevTools. The Network tab gave me a mild panic attack. It was loading four different weights of Roboto and Montserrat by default. Why do theme devs still do this?

I had to immediately dive into my child theme’s functions.php and dequeue their custom font handle (konstruktion-google-fonts) to host them locally.

The Elementor integration is decent, but the DOM tree gets deep fast. If you’re building complex hero sections with their custom widgets, expect a lot of nested divs. It looks pretty, but your PageSpeed scores will need some aggressive caching to compensate.

Fixing the JS Minification Mess

Here’s where I lost two hours of my life. I use WP Rocket on all my builds. The second I turned on JS minification and deferral, the mobile menu in Konstruktion completely died. It just wouldn’t toggle.

Turns out, their custom navigation script relies heavily on jQuery firing immediately. I had to manually exclude konstruktion-main.js and jquery-core from deferral in the cache settings. Once I added those exclusions, it worked fine, but it’s annoying that modern themes aren’t built with deferred JS in mind.

Customizer vs. Hardcoded Garbage

The Theme Options panel (built on Redux, ugh, but it works) handles most of the global typography and colors. But the top bar? The one with the phone number and email? Completely hardcoded in template-parts/header/top-bar.php.

If you want to add a custom ACF field there for dynamic business hours, you can’t just drop in a widget. You have to override the file in your child theme and echo the PHP out manually. At least they used get_template_part() properly so overriding is straightforward without breaking the parent update path.

Licensing and Updates (GPL Reality)

Let’s talk licensing, because this saves a lot of headaches. Like most standard WP products, Konstruktion is 100% GNU GPL compliant. You don’t need to hunt down license keys or deal with annoying dashboard banners to make it work.

All the premium features, including the one-click demo import, are fully unlocked out of the box for unlimited website usage. I just spun up my staging environment, pulled in the roofing demo data, and got straight to work.

The only catch with this GPL setup is updates. Since there’s no active key phoning home to their server, you won’t get automatic dashboard notifications. I just handle updates manually by uploading the new zip via Appearance -> Themes (it overwrites perfectly in modern WP) or pushing the extracted folder via FTP if I’m already in the terminal. Takes two seconds.

Dev-to-Dev FAQ

Does Konstruktion play nice with Perfmatters?

Mostly, yes. But disable the “Remove Unused CSS” feature for their custom portfolio post type archive. It strips out the grid classes for some reason and leaves you with a massive, unstyled single column.

How hard is it to change the default custom post type slugs?

Annoying. They registered the ‘Services’ CPT in a core plugin (konstruktion-core/class-cpt.php) without an easy filter for the rewrite slug. I had to use the register_post_type_args hook in my child theme to rewrite it to /roofing-services/ and flush permalinks twice.

Any hidden WooCommerce conflicts?

The Woo cart fragments script loads on every single page, even if you don’t sell anything and just use it for a catalog. Dequeue wc-cart-fragments immediately in your functions file to save yourself 800ms of load time.