Introduction Best WordPress Template For Authors

Within the previous ten years, I’ve used a great deal of different WordPress topics and have been very disappointed. Up till recently, I had been using MyThemeShop, that was fairly good. However, I still had to do a great deal of customization to allow it to do and operate how I wanted it to. A few weeks ago I decided to provide GeneratePress a try, and let me just say, it is by far the best WordPress theme I have discovered in 10 years. I had been blown away and am now moving all of my websites to GeneratePress. I will go into exactly why in my in-depth GeneratePress review below. And if you’re wondering, yes I have tried Genesis, Astra, OceanWP, Avada, X theme, Divi as well as several other lightweight and thicker multicolored themes. Best WordPress Template For Authors

To Begin, Click here to download GeneratePress.

GeneratePress Evaluation

GeneratePress is a totally free WordPress theme made by Tom Usborne, a programmer from Canada. I have actually seen it for many years from the WordPress repository. Most of you realize that I am fairly picky when it comes to web performance, so I have a tendency to dismiss everything from the repository. Typically because a lot of things on there isn’t that good, or not encouraged for long. Nonetheless, in this circumstance, that was a mistake. The theme now has more than half a million downloads, 80,000+ busy installs, with over 500 5-star evaluations. So obviously Tom is doing some thing right here.

I Really installed the free version of the motif and in a matter of 15 minutes bought the superior version. I could tell right off the bat, the developer was thinking precisely how I was envisioning a theme should get the job done. And I’ll go into that more below, but let us first look at some of the features. I’m going to be covering the premium version of the subject, because it’s worth . In fact, Tom, in the event that you ever read this and are visiting Scottsdale, Arizona, java on me.

Features

Super lightweight and fast. Modular design allowing you to enable/disable items you do not want running. This is one of the greatest reasons I adore GeneratePress.

Responsive, looks fantastic across all of the devices.

Schema built-in, for better outcomes in SERPs.

Impressive integration with all the WordPress Customizer. I haven’t been a fan of the customizer in the past, but Tom does it correctly.

Compatible with all popular plugins, Yoast SEO, WooCommerce, EDD, BuddyPress, bbPress, and WPML. Fantastic browser support back to IE8.

Additionally, it works great with all the favorite fast-growing Elementor page builder. If you want to dive into even more customizations, these really are a great combo. I’ve also read that people using Beaver Builder have experienced success.

Translation ready.

Font awesome built in.

Tons of hooks and filters that make it great for programmers.

Excellent active support from the programmer. Normally, 3 updates per month.

The Documentation can be incredible. Besides have good documentation on their website, the subject has existed long enough that everything I wholeheartedly during the setup procedure was found inside a few seconds from their forum.

Diving Into GeneratePress

Now it is Time for the fun part! I test a brand new theme right from the box without any customizations to see how quickly the foundation is. This tells me a great deal of what I can expect by the time I add everything to it. Running the inventory GeneratePress WordPress theme on Kinsta hosting clocked in at a whopping 265 ms load time. I was quite impressed.

One Thing I was concerned about with GeneratePress was that the modular design was going to produce a lot of big files, but this is not the case. You can tell that Tom actually worked hard on making sure every file packed in GeneratePress is as small as possible. With HTTP/2, the amount of documents isn’t as significant. But the dimensions is! Have a look at some of the core GeneratePress files below:

/generatepress/css/unsemantic-grid. min.css 2.9 KB

/generatepress/style. css 7.1 KB

/generatepress/css/mobile. min.css 1.6 KB

/generatepress/js/navigation. min.js 1.1 KB

/generatepress/js/dropdown. min.js 1.5 KB

This is a programmer that cares about functionality! And I’ve Seen exactly the same throughout each of the premium add-ons. They’re as small as you can possibly get them. In reality, Font Awesome is most likely the largest file contained. And that isn’t even his. With Font Awesome 5 coming round the cornerwe could anticipate this to secure smaller also.

The premium add-ons Are setup in what I’d call a modular design. It is possible to activate/deactivate anything you aren’t using to guarantee they do not load on your website. Since the co-developer of this perfmatters plugin which has a script manager built-in, I felt at home with this. Everything should be designed this way.

If You are interested, I am using the next add-ons on this website:

Website

Colors

Hooks

Page Header

Spacing

Typography

No Child Theme Needed

One of The best features of GeneratePress is I no more have to use a Child theme. This makes my life so much easier. No more editing my functions.php or header.php files. I will literally upgrade my GeneratePress motif this exact moment and not shed one customization. The hooks add-on definitely helps make it possible. It allows you to add custom code/PHP everywhere throughout your WordPress site. Best WordPress Template For Authors

Other Things I Love About GeneratePress

On every Page/post that you have a lot of alternatives. You are able to alter the sidebar layout and the footer widgets.

You Can easily swap a page between the default to a complete width page, as well as disable components.

The WordPress customizer options is really where GeneratePress really shines! Bear in mind, a lot of these options are enabled from the premium add-ons. I can not show you everything, otherwise, we would be here all day. However, allow me to show you couple which actually come in handy.

Responsive Columns

Another Plugin I highly recommend grabbing is your free Lightweight Grid Columns. Not to my surprise, this can be made by the exact same developer as GeneratePress. It allows you a super simple way to incorporate responsive columns into any page or post. Features include:

Desktop grid width

Tablet grid thickness

Mobile grid width

Add custom classes

Add custom inline designs

Equal height columns

Here is An example under:

You might want to Also catch his incredible WP Display Posts plugin also. See my featured posts on the sidebar of this website? That is using the WP Show Posts plugin. I have it set to display posts from a specific”featured” category. You might also get it show past modified/updated posts, recent posts, etc.. I am using the free version and it works great.

To Get started, Click here to download GeneratePress.

Sections Add-on

The Sections add-on in the premium version of GeneratePress lets you do all sorts of things in terms of design. Consider it like a webpage builder with no bloat. GeneratePress is certainly not just for blogs! I’m in fact using GeneratePress for our ecommerce website (perfmatters.io) that is running Easy Digital Downloads. Don’t hesitate to check it out. However, as you can see below, it looks nothing like a blog.

Speed Tests

For all those Of you who are regular readers, you probably didn’t even notice I changed the whole theme that powers woorkup.com. It only took me about an hour to get GeneratePress to mimic my MyThemeShop motif which I had spent annually customizing. Here’s a comparison under.

woorkup.com Old MyThemeShop Theme

My old MyThemeShop motif was already pretty quickly, but I spent a great deal of time scrutinizing it. In fact, I have gotten a lot of emails from you guys asking me to publish all my customizations. My advice now is, simply get GeneratePress!

woorkup.com New GeneratePress Theme

Together with the New GeneratePress theme I was able to attain faster speeds and 600 fewer lines of code! And remember, I do not have a child theme. All the customizations were created using the awesome GP hooks and snippets plugin (both CSS and PHP).

Like the WordPress theme I’ve working on woorkup? You are in luck. Tom asked if he can create a copy of woorkup for the new GeneratePress site library. I’m happy to allow you to know that you can now install my woorkup motif in your own GeneratePress website with just a click! It’s known as the Marketer motif. Get started with a great blog design immediately.

brianjackson.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

Additionally, I Moved within my personal website, brianjackson.io, to GeneratePress. Previously I was using a motif from Array Themes. It’s a pretty basic minimal website, since I don’t use it for much. As you can see it loaded pretty quickly.

brianjackson.io New GeneratePress Theme

I had been Able to replicate the whole appearance 100 percent in GeneratePress in under an hour. And as you can view it loads even faster! Amazing. I was even able to get rid of a couple plugins that weren’t needed because of GP.

forgemedia.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

I also Moved over our organization website, forgemedia.io, to GeneratePress. Previously I had been using a motif from Array Themes. It’s a pretty basic minimum site, as we simply use it to our LLC. Since you can see it already loaded pretty quickly. Best WordPress Template For Authors

forgemedia.io New GeneratePress Theme

I was Able to again move everything over and get it looking just how I wanted it in under one hour. And since you can view it loads even faster! Amazing. I managed to eliminate a total of four plugins and it dropped my whole page burden 2x!

I can’t express my Excitement about locating GeneratePress and I am moving over all my sites to it (which includes some EDD e-commerce websites ). After I’ve got my 9 sites all running in GP without any child themes, my entire life is going to be a breeze! The developer has revived my faith in multi-purpose themes, which when done the right way, can actually perform quicker.

And The best news is, I finally have a billion more options to pick from than I did before.

What GeneratePress Is Great For…

GeneratePress Is the perfect alternative for performance-focused users that wish to have the ability to personalize and control precisely how their site appears.

You Can make GeneratePress perform pretty much anything. And since GeneratePress has a focus on functionality, the site that you build will have a great base to make it load fast.

Since Of that, those who assemble WordPress sites for a living love GeneratePress. They’ll typically pair it with a WordPress page builder and use it for literally any kind of site.

But GeneratePress Might Not Be A Good Fit If…

…you Want something that will immediately appear perfect out of the box.

For Example, if you know you wish to create a fashion blog, you may be happier picking out a niche theme that is developed exclusively for trend bloggers.

Even though GeneratePress is becoming a great deal simpler to use, as a result of its pre-built Site Library, GeneratePress still seems very barebones if you initially install it.

So To make GeneratePress look how you want it to, you will almost certainly need to go in and personalize things. And while the significant advantage of GeneratePress is how customizable it is, many users, particularly casual users, don’t like having to make those changes themselves.

GeneratePress Features Which Make It Unique

Here Are some of the particular features that clarify why GeneratePress is indeed popular.

Plenty Of Customization Options From The Real-Time WordPress Customizer

Beyond Functionality, another area where GeneratePress does nicely is its customization choices.

GeneratePress Uses the WordPress Customizer for customization, and this can be convenient as you’ll be able to see all the changes that you create in real time.

The Free variant of GeneratePress provides you decent possibilities, but should you own GeneratePress Premium, you will have the ability to customize pretty much all about your site.

For Example, if you go in the Design area, you can configure detailed settings for yourown:

Header — you can move your header around and alter its own styling
Navigation — GeneratePress gives you two different navigation options, including sticky menus
Sidebar layout — you can utilize one or two sidebars
Blog post design — such as featured image dimensions, metadata, etc..
Footer layout — just like how many widgets to add

Similarly, The Typography area enables you to control the font to get every single element on your website, including buttons:

And You also get a thorough region to control the color of each and every element on your site.

All Whatsoever, GeneratePress will provide you a lot more customization choices from the WordPress Customizer compared to most other topics. This level of detail might be a little overwhelming if you’re a beginner. But once you realize the way the preferences come together, you will have complete control over how your website appears.

Optimized Performance And Quick Page Load Times

Around All of its attributes, GeneratePress consistently has a focus on excellent performance and clean code. The whole theme is less than 30 kB, which will be about as small as you’ll ever find for a WordPress theme. Even most other optimized WordPress themes are still 200+ kB. And some badly coded themes can even exceed 1 MB!

GeneratePress Also does not have any code dependencies, which helps you avoid the render obstructing error that Google Pagespeed Insights often mentions.

Place That together, and you get a superfast-loading motif. How fast? To give you a sense, I ran a small test.

First, I set up an empty website using a haphazard popular WordPress.org theme (Envo Magazine). After analyzing its performance with Pingdom, it:

Had a performance tier of 77
Loaded in 1.05 seconds
Had a page size of 243.9 kB
Had 15 asks

That is Not bad at all! However, GeneratePress can do better.

Next, I activated GeneratePress on the exact same test site without changing anything else. Here’s how GeneratePress failed:

Had a performance grade of 87, 10 points better
Loaded in 666 ms, ~37% faster
Had a page size of 26.8 kB, ~90% smaller
Had 9 requests, ~40% fewer

If You do that same test with different topics, you are going to continue to see that GeneratePress is among the fastest-loading WordPress topics in existence. Best WordPress Template For Authors

Other Useful Premium Extensions, Plus A Modular Approach

Past Giving you more style controls in the WordPress Customizer, GeneratePress Premium also comes with a lot of other useful features such as:

Elements — a unique feature that allows you create customized hooks, page headers, or layout templates.
Page Header — allows you create a exceptional page header on a per-page basis.
Sections — that is kind of like lightweight page building. It permits you to create separate”sections” on a page, each with their own layout and column preferences.

To Remain lightweight, GeneratePress also gives you a modular port where you could select and choose exactly which features you want to trigger.

That Way, you do not need to slow your site down for a quality which you’re never going to use.

Pre-Made Starter Sites Make It Easier To Design Your Website

In The last, you had to build GeneratePress sites from a blank canvas no matter what, which left the theme difficult for casual users to set up.

Earlier In 2018, though, the developer added a new Site Library attribute for GeneratePress Premium users that lets you easily import any among those 25+ pre-built demonstration websites .

You Can import them directly from the WordPress dashboard.

Yes — this site still uses GeneratePress! All I did was click on a couple buttons to import a presentation site.

Page-Level Settings Give You Comprehensive Control Over Every Piece Of Content

With Most topics, every post and page will use the very same configurations for the most part. You might have some custom templates or formats — however you do not have very much control past that.

GeneratePress Changes that by giving you a brand new Layout meta name box for every single page and post:

You Can use this meta box to:

Change the number of sidebars your website uses, or the sidebar orientation (such as altering the sidebar from right to left)
Choose the number of footer widgets to utilize
Disable certain components, like your header, navigation menu, post featured image, post title, or footer
Produce a special”container” to your page builder

Where These controls would be the most helpful is if you are using a WordPress page builder.

By Disabling certain elements, you are able to create the correct baseline for your own page builder layout, which makes it effortless to create custom articles as needed. Best WordPress Template For Authors

GeneratePress Pricing: Affordable And Works On Unlimited Sites

The Core GeneratePress theme can be obtained at no cost at WordPress.org.

That said, If you’re seriously interested in using GeneratePress, I believe you should buy the GeneratePress Premium plugin, as that’s what makes the theme so elastic. The free version does not give you almost as many configurations in the WordPress Customizer. And you will also miss out on the premade Site Library.

GeneratePress Premium can be still fairly reasonably priced. It costs only $39.95, which gives you use on unlimited websites . You’ll also get a 40% discount if you would like to renew to continue receiving support and updates after the initial year (you can, obviously, continue using GeneratePress after the initial year without beating — you just won’t receive any more upgrades ).

When You believe that the normal premium WordPress theme will often cost around $60, GeneratePress provides a great value.

Conclusion

As I said, I don’t believe GeneratePress is for everybody.

If You desire a niche-specific motif, you can probably save time by purchasing a theme that satisfies your needs for your niche from day one.

However, If you are ready to spend some time altering settings, GeneratePress’ mode controls give you the flexibility to flip it into any sort of WordPress website. Or, you might even be able to locate a starter site that fulfills your needs to save some time.

Additionally, It’s among those fastest-loading WordPress topics that you will locate. Therefore, if you’re looking for the best performance possible, using GeneratePress as your WordPress site’s base is a good decision.

If You blend it with fast-loading hosting, so you shouldn’t have any difficulty making your site load in under one second. Best WordPress Template For Authors