Background Best Blog Layouts

Over the previous 10 decades, I have used a lot of different WordPress themes and have been very disappointed. Up till recently, I was utilizing MyThemeShop, which was fairly good. However, I had to perform a lot of customization to allow it to do and operate the way I needed it to. A couple weeks ago I decided to give GeneratePress a try, and let me just say, it’s undoubtedly the finest WordPress theme I’ve found in a decade . I had been dismissed and am moving all my sites to GeneratePress. I’ll go into exactly why in my in-depth GeneratePress review under. And if you’re wondering, yes I have attempted Genesis, Astra, OceanWP, Avada, X theme, Divi as well as several other lightweight and heavier multicolored themes. Best Blog Layouts

To Begin, Click here to download GeneratePress.

GeneratePress Evaluation

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

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

Characteristics

Super lightweight and fast. Modular design allowing you to enable/disable things you don’t want running. This is only one of the biggest reasons I love GeneratePress.

Responsive, looks fantastic across all of the devices.

Schema built-in, for better outcomes in SERPs.

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

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

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

Translation ready.

Font wonderful built-in.

A lot of hooks and filters which make it great for programmers.

Great active service from the developer. On average, 3 updates per month.

The Documentation can be incredible. Besides have good documentation on their site, the subject has existed long enough that everything I wholeheartedly throughout the setup procedure was found within a couple of seconds in their forum.

Diving Into GeneratePress

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

One Thing I was worried about with GeneratePress was that the modular design was going to produce a whole lot of big files, but this isn’t the case. You may tell that Tom literally worked hard on making sure that every file loaded in GeneratePress is as small as possible. Together with HTTP/2, the amount of files is not as important. But the size is! Have a peek at some of the center 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

That is a programmer that cares about performance! And I have Seen the same during all the premium add-ons. They’re as small as possible get them. In reality, Font Awesome is most likely the biggest file contained. And that is not even his. With Font Awesome 5 arriving around the cornerwe can anticipate this to secure smaller too.

The premium add-ons Are setup in what I would call a modular layout. You can activate/deactivate anything you are not using to ensure they do not load on your site. Since the co-developer of this perfmatters plugin which has a script supervisor built-in, I felt at home with this. Everything should be made 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 characteristics of GeneratePress is that I no more need to use a young child motif . This makes my life so much simpler. No longer editing my functions.php or header.php documents. I will literally upgrade my GeneratePress motif this exact minute and not lose a single customization. The hooks add-on definitely can help make this possible. It allows you to incorporate custom code/PHP anywhere throughout your WordPress site. Best Blog Layouts

Other Things I Love About GeneratePress

On each Page/post you have a great deal of alternatives. You can change the sidebar layout and the footer widgets.

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

The WordPress customizer choices is where GeneratePress really shines! Remember, lots of these options are permitted by the superior add-ons. I can not show you everything, otherwise, we would be here daily. However, let me show you few which really come in handy.

Responsive Columns

Another Plugin I highly suggest grabbing is the free Lightweight Grid Columns. Not to my surprise, this is also made by the exact same developer as GeneratePress. It enables you a super easy way to incorporate responsive columns into any page or article. Characteristics include:

Desktop grid width

Tablet grid width

Mobile grid width

Insert custom classes

Add custom inline styles

Equal height columns

This is An example below:

You might want to Also catch his amazing WP Show Posts plugin too. View my featured posts on the sidebar of this website? That is using the WP Display Posts plugin. I have it set to display posts from a particular”featured” category. You can also have it show past modified/updated articles, recent articles, etc.. I’m using the free version and it works great.

To Begin, Click here to download GeneratePress.

Sections Add-on

The Sections add-on in the premium version of GeneratePress lets you perform all kinds of things in terms of design. Consider it like a page builder without the bloat. GeneratePress is certainly not only for blogs! I am in fact using GeneratePress for our ecommerce website (perfmatters.io) which is running Easy Digital Downloads. Feel free to check it out. However, as you can see below, it looks nothing like a blog.

Speed Tests

For all those Of you that are regular readers, you probably didn’t even notice that I changed the whole theme that powers woorkup.com. It just took me about an hour for GeneratePress to mimic my MyThemeShop theme that I had spent a year customizing. Here is a comparison under.

woorkup.com Old MyThemeShop Theme

My older MyThemeShop motif was pretty quickly, but I invested a lot of time customizing 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

With the New GeneratePress motif I managed to achieve faster speeds and 600 fewer lines of code! And remember, I don’t have a kid theme. All the customizations were created using the awesome GP hooks and snippets plugin (both CSS and PHP).

Like the WordPress theme I’ve running on woorkup? You are in luck. Tom asked if he could create a replica of woorkup to your new GeneratePress blog library. I am pleased to let you know that you can now put in my woorkup motif on your own GeneratePress website with just a click! It’s called the Marketer theme. Get started using a fantastic blog layout immediately.

brianjackson.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

Additionally, I Moved within my personal website, brianjackson.io, to GeneratePress. Previously I had been using a motif from Array Themes. It is a pretty basic minimum website, as I don’t use it to get much. Since you can see it loaded pretty quickly.

brianjackson.io New GeneratePress Theme

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

forgemedia.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

I also Moved over our organization site, forgemedia.io, to GeneratePress. Previously I was using a motif from Array Themes. It is a pretty basic minimum site, as we simply use it to our LLC. As you can see it loaded pretty fast. Best Blog Layouts

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 as you can view it loads even faster! Amazing. I managed to eliminate a total of four plugins and it dropped my total page burden 2x!

I can’t express my Excitement about locating GeneratePress and I’m moving over all of my sites to it (which includes some EDD e-commerce websites ). Once I’ve got my 9 websites all running in GP with no child topics, my life will be a breeze! The developer has revived my faith in multi-purpose themes, and that when done the correct way, can actually perform faster.

And The best news isI now have a billion more choices to pick from than I did before.

What GeneratePress Is Great For…

GeneratePress Is the perfect alternative for performance-focused users who wish to be able to customize and control exactly how their site looks.

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

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

But GeneratePress Might Not Be A Good Fit If…

…you Need something that will instantly look 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.

While GeneratePress has gotten a great deal simpler to use, thanks to its pre-built Site Library, GeneratePress still looks very barebones if you initially install it.

So To create GeneratePress look how you would like it to, you will most likely will need to go in and customize matters. And while the substantial advantage of GeneratePress is how customizable it is, some users, especially casual users, do not like having to make those changes themselves.

GeneratePress Features That Make It Unique

Here Are some of the specific features that explain why GeneratePress is indeed common.

Lots Of Customization Options From The Real-Time WordPress Customizer

Past Performance, another area where GeneratePress does well is its customization choices.

GeneratePress Utilizes the WordPress Customizer for customization, and this can be convenient because you’ll have the ability to see all the changes that you create in real time.

The Free variant of GeneratePress provides you adequate options, but should you have GeneratePress Premium, you will be able to customize nearly everything about your website.

For Example, if you go in the Design region, you can configure comprehensive settings for your:

• Header — you can move your header around and alter its styling
• Navigation — GeneratePress gives you two different navigation options, such as sticky menus
• Sidebar design — you can utilize one or two sidebars
• Blog post design — like featured picture size, metadata, etc..
• Footer layout — like the number of widgets to include

Similarly, That the Typography area lets you control the font to get every single element on your site, such as buttons:

And You also get a thorough area to control the colour of each and every element on your website.

All Whatsoever, GeneratePress will provide you much more customization options from the WordPress Customizer compared to most other topics. This level of detail may be a bit overwhelming if you are a newcomer. But as soon as you understand how the settings come together, you will have full control on how your website looks.

Optimized Performance And Fast Page Load Times

Around All its features, GeneratePress consistently includes a focus on excellent performance and tidy code. The whole theme is less than 30 kB, which is about as little as you are ever going to find for a WordPress theme. Even most other optimized WordPress themes 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.

Place That together, and you get a superfast-loading motif. How quickly? To give you a sense, I conducted a little test.

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

• Had a performance grade of 77
• Loaded in 1.05 seconds
• Had a page size of 243.9 kB
• Had 15 requests

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

Next, I triggered GeneratePress on exactly the exact same test site without altering anything else. Here is how GeneratePress did:

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

If You perform that same test with other topics, you are going to continue to find that GeneratePress is among those fastest-loading WordPress topics in existence. Best Blog Layouts

Other Helpful Premium Extensions, Plus Much Modular Approach

Beyond Giving you more design controls from the WordPress Customizer, GeneratePress Premium also comes with a lot of other helpful features like:

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

To Stay lightweight, GeneratePress also gives you a modular port where you can select and choose what features you would like to trigger.

That Way, you don’t need 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 past, you needed to construct GeneratePress websites from a blank canvas regardless of what, which left the motif difficult for casual users to install.

Earlier In 2018, though, the programmer added a fresh Website Library attribute for GeneratePress Premium users which allows you easily import any among those 25+ pre-built demonstration websites .

You Can import them right from your WordPress dashboard.

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

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

With Most topics, every page and post 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 beyond that.

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

You Can utilize this meta box to:

• Change how many sidebars your website uses, or the sidebar orientation (such as changing the sidebar from right to left)
• Choose how many footer widgets to utilize
• Disable certain components, such as your header, navigation menu, post featured picture, article title, or footer
• Produce a special”container” for your page builder

Where These controls would be the most useful is if you’re using a WordPress page builder.

By Disabling certain elements, you’re in a position to create the correct baseline for your own page builder design, making it easy to create custom articles as needed. Best Blog Layouts

GeneratePress Replies: Affordable And Works On Unlimited Sites

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

Nevertheless, If you’re seriously interested in using GeneratePress, I believe you need to purchase the GeneratePress Premium plugin, as that is what makes the theme so elastic. The free version doesn’t give you nearly as numerous settings from the WordPress Customizer. And you will also lose out on the premade Site Library.

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

When You believe the typical premium WordPress theme will usually cost around $60, GeneratePress offers a fantastic price.

Wrap-up

As I mentioned, I do not believe GeneratePress is for everybody.

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

However, If you’re willing to spend time altering settings, GeneratePress’ mode controls give you the flexibility to flip it into any sort of WordPress website. Or, you might even have the ability to find a starter website that fits your needs to save some time.

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

If You blend it with fast-loading hosting, so you should have no problem making your website load in under one second. Best Blog Layouts

To Begin, Click here to download GeneratePress.