Background Best Free Mobile WordPress Template

Over the past 10 years, I have used a lot of different WordPress topics and have been really disappointed. Up until recently, I was utilizing MyThemeShop, which was fairly good. But I still had to perform a great deal of customization to make it perform and work how I wanted it to. A couple of weeks ago I decided to give GeneratePress a try, and let me just say, it is undoubtedly the finest WordPress theme I have found in 10 years. I had been blown away and am moving all my sites to GeneratePress. I will go into precisely why in my comprehensive GeneratePress review under. And if you are wondering, yes I’ve attempted Genesis, Astra, OceanWP, Avada, X theme, Divi in addition to many other lightweight and heavier multi-purpose themes. Best Free Mobile WordPress Template

To Get started, Click here to download GeneratePress.

GeneratePress Review

GeneratePress is a totally free WordPress theme made by Tom Usborne, a programmer from Canada. I’ve really seen it for many years in the WordPress repository. Most of you know that I am fairly picky when it comes to web performance, and so I tend to dismiss everything in the repository. Typically because a lot of stuff on there is not that good, or not supported for long. Nonetheless, in this case, that was a mistake. The theme currently has more than half a million downloads, 80,000+ active 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 imagining a theme should work. And I’ll go into that more below, but let’s first look at a number of the qualities. I’m going to be covering the premium version of the theme, because it’s worth . In fact, Tom, in the event that you ever read this and so are seeing Scottsdale, Arizona, java on me.

Characteristics

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

Responsive, looks great across all of the devices.

Schema built-in, for better results in SERPs.

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

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

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

Resumes prepared.

Font wonderful built in.

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

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

The Documentation can be unbelievable. Besides have great documentation on their site, the theme has been around long enough that everything I Googled during the setup process was found within a few seconds in their forum.

Going Deep Into GeneratePress

Now it is Time for the fun part! I test a new theme right out of the box with no customizations to just see how quickly the foundation is. This tells me a lot 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 layout was going to generate a lot of big files, but that isn’t the case. You can tell that Tom actually worked hard on making sure every file loaded in GeneratePress is as small as possible. With HTTP/2, the amount of files isn’t as significant. But the dimensions is! Have a look at some of the core 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

This is a developer that cares about performance! And I have Seen the same throughout each the premium add-ons. They are as small as you can possibly get them. In fact, Font Awesome is probably the biggest file contained. And that isn’t even his. Together with Font Awesome 5 arriving around the corner, we can expect this to secure smaller also.

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

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

Website

Shades

Hooks

Page Header

Spacing

Typography

No Child Theme Needed

One of The best features of GeneratePress is I no longer need to use a Child theme. This makes my life much simpler. No longer editing my functions.php or header.php documents. I can literally upgrade my GeneratePress theme this exact minute and not lose a single customization. The hooks add-on certainly can help make this possible. It allows you to add custom code/PHP everywhere throughout your WordPress site. Best Free Mobile WordPress Template

Other Things I Love About GeneratePress

On every Page/post that you have a lot of options. You are able to change the sidebar design and the footer widgets.

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

The WordPress customizer options is where GeneratePress really shines! Bear in mind, a lot of these choices are enabled by the superior add-ons. I can not show you everything, otherwise, we would be here all day. But allow me to show you couple which really 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 enables you a super easy way to add responsive columns into any page or article. Features include:

Desktop grid width

Tablet grid thickness

Mobile grid width

Insert Customized classes

Insert custom inline styles

Equal height columns

Here is An example under:

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

To Begin, Click here to download GeneratePress.

Sections Add-on

The Sections add-on in the premium edition of GeneratePress lets you do all sorts of things in terms of design. Consider it like a page builder without the bloat. GeneratePress is definitely not only for blogs! I am in fact utilizing GeneratePress to our ecommerce site (perfmatters.io) which is running Easy Digital Downloads. Feel free to check it out. However, as you can see below, it looks like a site.

Speed Tests

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

woorkup.com Old MyThemeShop Theme

My older MyThemeShop motif was already pretty quickly, but I spent a lot of time customizing it. In reality, I’ve gotten a lot of emails from you guys asking me to publish all my customizations. My advice now is, just 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 keep in mind, I don’t have a child motif. Each of the customizations were created using the wonderful GP hooks and snippets plugin (both CSS and PHP).

Like the WordPress theme I’ve running on woorkup? You’re in luck. Tom asked if he can make a replica of woorkup to your new GeneratePress blog library. I am happy to allow you to know that now you can put in my woorkup theme on your GeneratePress website with just a click! It is known as the Marketer motif. Get started using a fantastic blog layout instantly.

brianjackson.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

I also Moved over my private website, brianjackson.io, to GeneratePress. Previously I had been using a theme from Array Themes. It’s a pretty basic minimal website, as I don’t use it to get much. As you can see it already loaded pretty quickly.

brianjackson.io New GeneratePress Theme

I had been Able to replicate the whole appearance 100% in GeneratePress in under one hour. And as you can view it loads even faster! Amazing. I was 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 business website, forgemedia.io, to GeneratePress. Previously I was using a theme from Array Themes. It is a pretty basic minimum site, as we simply use it to our LLC. As you can see it already loaded pretty fast. Best Free Mobile WordPress Template

forgemedia.io New GeneratePress Theme

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

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

And The best thing isI finally have a thousand more choices to pick from than I did earlier.

What GeneratePress Is Good For…

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

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

Because Of that, people 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 type of website.

However GeneratePress Might Not Be A Fantastic Combination If…

…you Want something which will instantly appear perfect out of the box.

For Example, if you realize you wish to create a fashion blog, you might be happier choosing a market theme that’s developed exclusively for trend bloggers.

While GeneratePress is becoming a great deal easier to use, as a result of its pre-built Site Library, GeneratePress still seems very barebones if you first install it.

So To make GeneratePress look how you would like it to, you’ll most likely will need to go in and personalize matters. And though the substantial advantage of GeneratePress is how customizable it is, some users, especially casual users, don’t like having to make those changes themselves.

GeneratePress Features That Make It Unique

Here Are a few of the specific features that clarify why GeneratePress is indeed popular.

Lots Of Customization Options In The Real-Time WordPress Customizer

Beyond Functionality, another place where GeneratePress does well is its customization options.

GeneratePress Uses the WordPress Customizer for customization, and this is convenient as you’ll be able 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 have the ability to customize nearly everything about your site.

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

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

Similarly, The Typography place enables you to control the font to get every single element on your site, such as buttons:

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

All In all, GeneratePress will give you a lot more customization choices from the WordPress Customizer than most other themes. This level of detail might be a little overwhelming if you are a newcomer. But once you understand the way the preferences come together, you will have full control on how your website looks.

Optimized Performance And Fast Page Load Times

Around All its attributes, GeneratePress always has a focus on excellent performance and clean code. The entire motif 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 some badly coded topics can even surpass 1 MB!

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

Put That collectively, and you obtain a superfast-loading motif. How quickly? To give you an idea, I ran a small test.

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

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

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

Next, I activated GeneratePress on the same test website without changing anything else. Here is how GeneratePress failed:

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 asks, ~40% fewer

If You do that same test with different topics, you are going to continue to find that GeneratePress is one of those fastest-loading WordPress topics in life. Best Free Mobile WordPress Template

Other Useful Premium Extensions, Plus A Modular Approach

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

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

To Remain lightweight, GeneratePress also gives you a modular interface where you could pick and choose what characteristics you want to trigger.

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

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

In The past, you had to construct GeneratePress sites from a blank canvas no matter what, which left the theme difficult for casual users to install.

Earlier In 2018, though, the developer added a new 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 the WordPress dashboard.

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

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

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

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

You Can utilize this meta box to:

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

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

By Disabling certain elements, you’re in a position to produce the proper baseline for your page builder layout, making it easy to create custom articles as needed. Best Free Mobile WordPress Template

GeneratePress Replies: Affordable And Works On Unlimited Sites

The Heart GeneratePress motif can be obtained at no cost at WordPress.org.

That said, If you are serious about utilizing GeneratePress, I believe you need to purchase the GeneratePress Premium plugin, as that is what produces the theme so flexible. The free version doesn’t give you almost as numerous settings in the WordPress Customizer. And you’ll also miss out on the premade Site Library.

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

When You consider that the typical premium WordPress theme will often cost around $60, GeneratePress offers a great price.

Wrap-up

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

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

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

Additionally, It is among those fastest-loading WordPress topics that you will find. So if you’re looking for the best performance possible, utilizing GeneratePress as your WordPress site’s foundation is a great choice.

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