Intro Ad Word Express

Over the previous 10 decades, I’ve used a lot of different WordPress themes and have been very disappointed. Up till recently, I was using MyThemeShop, that was pretty excellent. But I had to perform a lot of customization to allow it to perform and work the way I wanted it to. A couple weeks ago I decided to give GeneratePress a try, and let me just say, it’s by far the finest WordPress theme I have found in 10 years. I had been blown away and am now moving all my websites to GeneratePress. I will enter precisely why in my in-depth GeneratePress review under. And if you are wondering, yes I have tried Genesis, Astra, OceanWP, Avada, X theme, Divi in addition to several other lightweight and thicker multicolored themes. Ad Word Express

To Get started, Click here to download GeneratePress.

GeneratePress Evaluation

GeneratePress is a totally free WordPress theme created by Tom Usborne, a programmer from Canada. I have actually seen it for many years in the WordPress repository. Most of you realize that I am fairly picky when it comes to web performance, so I tend to ignore everything from the repository. Typically because a lot of stuff on there isn’t that good, or not supported for long. However, in this case, that was a mistake. The theme currently has more than half a million downloads, 80,000+ busy installs, with over 500 5-star ratings. So obviously Tom is doing something right here.

I Actually installed the free version of the theme and in a matter of 15 minutes bought the premium version. I could tell right off the bat, the programmer was thinking precisely how I was envisioning a theme should get the job done. And I will go into that more below, but let’s first look at some of the features. I will be covering the superior version of the subject, because it’s worth very penny. In fact, Tom, if you ever read this and so are seeing Scottsdale, Arizona, coffees on me.

Features

Super lightweight and fast. Modular design allowing you to enable/disable things you do not need running. This is only one of the biggest reasons I adore GeneratePress.

Responsive, looks great across all devices.

Schema built-in, for greater results in SERPs.

Dramatic integration with all the WordPress Customizer. I have not been a lover of this customizer previously, but Tom does it correctly.

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

It also works great with all the popular fast-growing Elementor page builder. If you want to dive into even more customizations, these are a great combo. I’ve also read that individuals using Beaver Builder have had success.

Translation ready.

Font wonderful built-in.

A lot of hooks and filters which make it good for developers.

Excellent active support from the developer. On average, 3 updates per month.

The Documentation can be incredible. Besides have good documentation on their site, the theme has existed long enough that what I Googled during the setup procedure was found inside a couple of seconds from their forum.

Going Deep Into GeneratePress

Now it is Time for the fun part! I always test a brand new theme right out of the box with no customizations to just see how quickly the base 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 layout was going to produce a lot of big files, but that is not the situation. You may tell that Tom actually worked hard on ensuring every record loaded in GeneratePress is as little as possible. With HTTP/2, the number of documents is not as significant. However, the size is! Take a look at some of the center GeneratePress files under:

/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

That is a programmer that cares about functionality! And I’ve Seen exactly the same throughout each the premium add-ons. They are literally as small as you can possibly get them. In fact, Font Awesome is most likely the largest file contained. And that isn’t even his. With Font Awesome 5 coming around the corner, we could anticipate that to get smaller too.

The premium add-ons Are setup in what I would call a modular layout. It is possible to activate/deactivate anything you aren’t using to guarantee they do not load on your site. As the co-developer of the perfmatters plugin that has a script manager built, I felt at home for this. Everything ought to be designed this way.

If You’re interested, I am using the next add-ons on this site:

Website

Colors

Copyright

Hooks

Page Header

Spacing

Typography

No Child Theme Needed

One of The best features of GeneratePress is that I no longer have to use a young child theme. This makes my life so much simpler. No more editing my functions.php or header.php documents. I will literally upgrade my GeneratePress theme this exact moment and not lose one customization. The hooks add-on certainly helps make it possible. It permits you to incorporate custom code/PHP everywhere throughout your WordPress site. Ad Word Express

Other Things I Love About GeneratePress

On each Page/post that you have a great deal of options. You can alter the sidebar design and the footer widgets.

You Can easily swap a page involving the default to a complete width page, in addition to disable elements.

The WordPress customizer options is where GeneratePress really shines! Remember, lots of these options are enabled from the premium add-ons. I can’t show you everything, otherwise, we’d be here daily. But allow me to show you couple which really come in handy.

Responsive Columns

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

Desktop grid width

Tablet grid thickness

Mobile grid width

Add Customized classes

Add custom inline designs

Equal height columns

Here is An example under:

You May Want to Also catch his amazing WP Display Posts plugin also. View my featured posts on the sidebar of this site? That is using the WP Show Posts plugin. I have it set to show posts from a particular”featured” category. You might also have it show last modified/updated articles, recent posts, etc.. I am using the free version and it works terrific.

To Get started, Click here to download GeneratePress.

Sections Add-on

The Segments add-in in the premium version of GeneratePress lets you perform all sorts of things concerning design. Consider it like a page builder without the bloat. GeneratePress is certainly not just for blogs! I’m in fact utilizing GeneratePress for our ecommerce website (perfmatters.io) that is operating Easy Digital Downloads. Feel free to look it over. However, as you can see below, it looks like a blog.

Speed Tests

For all those Of you that are regular readers, you likely did not even notice that I changed the whole theme that powers woorkup.com. It just took me about an hour to get GeneratePress to mimic my MyThemeShop theme that I had spent annually customizing. Here is a comparison under.

woorkup.com Old MyThemeShop Theme

My old MyThemeShop motif was pretty fast, but I spent a lot of time scrutinizing it. In reality, I have gotten a lot of emails from you guys asking me to publish all of my customizations. My advice today is, just get GeneratePress!

woorkup.com New GeneratePress Theme

With the New GeneratePress motif I was able to achieve faster speeds and 600 fewer lines of code! And keep in mind, I do not have a kid theme. Each of the customizations were created with the wonderful GP hooks and snippets plugin (both CSS and PHP).

Like the WordPress theme I have working on woorkup? You’re in luck. Tom asked if he can make a replica of woorkup for the brand new GeneratePress site library. I am pleased to allow you to know that you can now install my woorkup theme on your GeneratePress site with only a single click! It’s known as the Marketer motif. Get started using a fantastic blog layout instantly.

brianjackson.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

Additionally, I Moved over my private site, brianjackson.io, to GeneratePress. Previously I was using a theme 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 fast.

brianjackson.io New GeneratePress Theme

I had been Able to duplicate the whole appearance 100% in GeneratePress in under one hour. And as you can see it loads even faster! Amazing. I was able to eliminate a couple plugins which weren’t needed because of GP.

forgemedia.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

Additionally, I Moved over our business site, forgemedia.io, to GeneratePress. Previously I was using a theme from Array Themes. It is a fairly basic minimal website, as we simply use it to our LLC. Since you can see it already loaded pretty fast. Ad Word Express

forgemedia.io New GeneratePress Theme

I was Able to move everything over and get it looking exactly how I needed it in under one hour. And since you can view it loads faster! Amazing. I managed to get rid of a total of four plugins and it dropped my whole page weight 2x!

I can not express my Excitement about finding GeneratePress and I’m moving over all of my sites for this (which comprises some EDD e-commerce websites ). Once I’ve got my 9 sites all running in GP without any child topics, my life will be a breeze! The programmer has revived my faith in multi-purpose themes, which when done the correct way, can actually perform quicker.

And The best thing is, I now have a billion more options to choose from than I did earlier.

What GeneratePress Is Good For…

GeneratePress Is the ideal alternative for performance-focused users who want to be able to personalize and control precisely how their site appears.

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

Because Of that, those who assemble WordPress websites for a living love GeneratePress. They will typically pair it with a WordPress page builder and use it for literally any type of site.

But GeneratePress Might Not Be A Good Fit If…

…you Want something that will instantly look perfect out of the box.

For Example, if you realize you want to produce a style blog, you may be happier picking out a niche theme that is developed exclusively for fashion bloggers.

While GeneratePress has gotten a great deal simpler to use, as a result of its pre-built Website Library, GeneratePress still seems very barebones when you first install it.

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

GeneratePress Features That Make It Unique

Here Are a few of the particular features that explain why GeneratePress is so popular.

Plenty Of Customization Options In The Real-Time WordPress Customizer

Past Performance, another place where GeneratePress does nicely is its customization choices.

GeneratePress Uses the WordPress Customizer for customization, which can be convenient as you’ll have the ability to see all of the changes that you make in real time.

The Free version of GeneratePress provides you adequate possibilities, but should you own GeneratePress Premium, you’ll be able to customize pretty much all about your site.

For Example, if you go into the Layout region, you may configure comprehensive settings for yourown:

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

Likewise, That the Typography area lets you control the font for every single element on your website, including buttons:

And You also receive a thorough region to control the color of every single element on your site.

All In all, GeneratePress will provide you a lot more customization choices from the WordPress Customizer than most other topics. This level of detail may be a little overwhelming if you are a beginner. But as soon as you realize how the preferences come together, you’ll have full control over how your site looks.

Optimized Performance And Fast Page Load Times

Across All of its attributes, GeneratePress always has a focus on excellent performance and tidy code. The entire theme is less than 30 kB, and it will be about as little as you’ll ever find for a WordPress theme. Even most other optimized WordPress topics are still 200+ kB. And a few badly coded themes can even surpass 1 MB!

GeneratePress Also has no code dependencies, which will help you avoid the leave obstructing error that Google Pagespeed Insights often cites.

Put That collectively, and you get a superfast-loading theme. How fast? To give you a sense, I conducted a little test.

First, I set up an empty site utilizing a random popular WordPress.org theme (Envo Magazine). After analyzing its performance with Pingdom, it

• Had a performance tier of 77
• Loaded in 1.05 moments
• Had a page size of 243.9 kB
• Had 15 requests

That is Not bad in any way! However, GeneratePress can do better.

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

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

If You perform that same test with different themes, you are going to continue to see that GeneratePress is one of the fastest-loading WordPress topics in life. Ad Word Express

Other Useful Premium Extensions, Plus A Modular Approach

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

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

To Stay lightweight, GeneratePress also provides you a modular port where you could pick and choose exactly which features you want to activate.

That Way, you do not have to slow your site down for a quality which you’ll never use.

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

In The last, you had to construct GeneratePress websites from a blank canvas no matter what, which made the motif difficult for casual users to set up.

Earlier In 2018, however, the developer added a new Site Library feature for GeneratePress Premium users that allows you easily import any among those 25+ pre-built demo sites.

You Can import them directly from the WordPress dashboard.

Yes — this Website still uses GeneratePress! All I did was click a few buttons to import a demo site.

Page-Level Settings Give You Detailed Control Over Each Piece Of Content

With Most themes, each post and page will use the very same configurations for the most part. You might have some custom templates or formats — but you do not have very much control beyond that.

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

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 how many footer widgets to utilize
• Disable certain elements, such as your header, navigation menu, article featured picture, article title, or footer
• Create a special”container” to your own page builder

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

By Disabling certain components, you’re in a position to produce the correct baseline for your page builder layout, making it easy to create custom articles as needed. Ad Word Express

GeneratePress Pricing: Cheap And Works On Unlimited Sites

The Heart GeneratePress theme is available for free at WordPress.org.

That said, If you are seriously interested in using GeneratePress, I believe you should buy the GeneratePress Premium plugin, as that is what makes the theme so elastic. The free version does not give you nearly as numerous configurations from the WordPress Customizer. And you’ll also lose out on the premade Site Library.

GeneratePress Premium can be still fairly affordable. It costs just $39.95, and that provides you use on unlimited sites. You’ll also get a 40% discount if you want to renew to continue receiving support and updates after the first year (you can, of course, continue using GeneratePress after the initial year without beating — you won’t receive any more upgrades ).

When You consider the normal premium WordPress theme will usually cost around $60, GeneratePress provides a great value.

Wrap-up

As I said, I do not think GeneratePress is for everybody.

If You desire a niche-specific theme, you can probably save time by buying a theme that fits your requirements for your market from day one.

However, If you are willing to spend time changing preferences, then GeneratePress’ style controls give you the flexibility to flip it into any sort of WordPress website. Or, you might even have the ability to locate a starter site that fulfills your needs to save some time.

Additionally, It’s one of the fastest-loading WordPress themes you will locate. So if you’re looking for the best performance possible, utilizing GeneratePress as your WordPress site’s foundation is a good choice.

If You combine it with fast-loading hosting, so you shouldn’t have any difficulty making your website load in under one second. Ad Word Express

To Begin, Click here to download GeneratePress.