Customizing Hugo PaperMod Without Forking the Theme

Sites that start from a stock theme tend to look like it. This one did too — until recently it was the default PaperMod screen. The editorial homepage and unified article styling you're looking at came out of a single day of customization. This guide is that work written down, with the code. One principle drove all of it: never fork the theme. The theme stays a submodule and keeps receiving updates; you win with site-level files only. Hugo resolves same-path site files ahead of theme files, which makes this possible. The entire customization of this site is a handful of files: layouts/index.html ← full homepage replacement data/home/ko.yaml, en.yaml ← homepage copy (per language) assets/css/extended/home.css ← homepage styles assets/css/extended/custom.css ← unifying every other page The starting point is a Hugo site with PaperMod as a submodule, deployed to GitHub Pages. Basic installation is well covered by the PaperMod wiki , so I'll skip it. 1. Replace the homepage wholesale Create a single layouts/index.html and the homepage is yours. The theme's home template stays untouched. The key move: don't hardcode copy into the markup — pull it from data files. On a bilingual site, one template then serves both languages: {{- $copy := index .Site.Data.home .Site.Language.Lang -}} {{- $posts := first 4 (where .Site.RegularPages.ByDate.Reverse "Section" "blog") -}} <section class= "editorial-hero" > <p class= "editorial-eyebrow" > {{ $copy.hero.eyebrow }} </p> <h1> {{ range $i, $line := $copy.hero.titleLines }}{{ if $i }} <br> {{ end }}{{ $line }}{{ end }} </h1> <p class= "editorial-intro" > {{ $copy.hero.intro }} </p> </section> data/home/en.yaml holds nothing but words: hero : eyebrow : " IDEAS · PRODUCTS · OPPORTUNITIES" titleLines : - " Where ideas become products," - " and products become new opportunities." Copy edits stop requiring template changes, and adding a language is one more yaml file. Latest posts are pulled dynamically as above — handle the {{ else }} emp