Background Best Premium WordPress Themes 2016

Over the previous ten years, I have used a great deal of different WordPress topics and have been really disappointed. Up until recently, I had been using MyThemeShop, that was pretty good. However, I had to do a lot of customization to allow it to perform and operate the way I wanted it to. A couple of weeks ago I decided to give GeneratePress a try, and let me just say, it is by far the best WordPress theme I’ve found in 10 years. I had been dismissed and am moving all of my websites to GeneratePress. I will go into exactly why in my in-depth GeneratePress review under. And if you’re wondering, yes I’ve tried Genesis, Astra, OceanWP, Avada, X motif, Divi as well as several other lightweight and heavier multicolored themes. Best Premium WordPress Themes 2016

To Get started, Click here to download GeneratePress.

GeneratePress Evaluation

GeneratePress is a free WordPress theme made by Tom Usborne, a programmer from Canada. I have actually seen it for years from the WordPress repository. Most of you know that I am fairly picky when it comes to web performance, and so I have a tendency to ignore everything from the repository. Typically because a great deal of stuff on there is not that good, or not supported for long. Nonetheless, in this case, this was a mistake. The motif now 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 Really set up 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 precisely how I was envisioning a theme should work. And I will go into that more below, but let us first look at a number of the qualities. I will be covering the superior edition of the theme, because it’s worth very penny. In fact, Tom, if you 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 do not need 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 with all the WordPress Customizer. I haven’t been a lover of the customizer in the past, but Tom does it right.

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

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

Translation ready.

Font wonderful built-in.

A lot of filters and hooks that make it good for programmers.

Excellent active service from the developer. Normally, 3 updates per month.

The Documentation can be unbelievable. Besides have great documentation on their site, the theme has existed long enough that everything I wholeheartedly throughout the setup process was found within a couple of seconds from their own forum.

Going Deep Into GeneratePress

Now it is Time for the fun part! I test a brand new theme right from the box with no customizations to see how fast the foundation is. This tells me a lot of what I could expect by the time I add everything to it. Running the inventory GeneratePress WordPress motif on Kinsta hosting clocked in at a whopping 265 ms load time. I was very impressed.

One Thing I was concerned about with GeneratePress was that the modular layout was going to generate a lot of big files, but this is not the situation. You can tell that Tom actually worked hard on making sure that every file loaded in GeneratePress is as small as possible. Together with HTTP/2, the number of files isn’t as significant. But the size is! Take a peek at a few 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

This is a developer that cares about functionality! And I have Seen exactly the same during each the premium add-ons. They are literally as small as possible get them. In reality, Font Awesome is probably the biggest file contained. And that isn’t even his. Together with Font Awesome 5 coming around the corner, we could anticipate this to get smaller also.

The premium add-ons Are installation in what I would call a modular layout. It is possible to activate/deactivate anything you are not using to guarantee they do not load on your website. Since the co-developer of this perfmatters plugin which has a script manager built, I felt right 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

Colors

Hooks

Page Header

Spacing

Typography

No Child Theme Needed

One of The best features of GeneratePress is that 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 can literally upgrade my GeneratePress theme this exact moment rather than shed a single customization. The hooks add-on certainly helps make this possible. It permits you to add custom code/PHP anywhere throughout your WordPress website. Best Premium WordPress Themes 2016

Other Things I Love About GeneratePress

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

You Can easily swap a page between the default option to a full width page, in addition to disable elements.

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

Responsive Columns

Another Plugin I highly suggest grabbing is the free Lightweight Grid Columns. Not to my surprise, this can be created by precisely the same programmer as GeneratePress. It enables you a super easy way to add responsive columns into any page or post. Features include:

Desktop grid thickness

Tablet grid thickness

Mobile grid width

Add custom courses

Add custom inline styles

Equal height columns

Here is An example under:

You May Want to Also grab his incredible WP Show Posts plugin too. See my featured posts on the sidebar of this website? That is using the WP Show Posts plugin. I have it set to show posts from a particular”featured” category. You can also get it show past modified/updated posts, 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 edition of GeneratePress allows you to perform all sorts of things concerning design. Consider it like a page builder with no bloat. GeneratePress is certainly not only for blogs! I’m in fact using GeneratePress for our ecommerce site (perfmatters.io) which is running Easy Digital Downloads. Feel free to check it out. But as you can see below, it looks like a site.

Speed Tests

For those Of those who are regular readers, you probably didn’t even notice that I changed the entire motif that forces woorkup.com. It just took me about an hour to get GeneratePress to mimic my MyThemeShop theme that I had spent a year customizing. Here’s a comparison below.

woorkup.com Old MyThemeShop Theme

My old MyThemeShop theme was already pretty fast, but I invested a lot of time scrutinizing it. In reality, I’ve gotten a lot of emails from you guys asking me to print 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 attain faster speeds and 600 fewer lines of code! And keep in mind, I do not have a kid theme. All the customizations were made with the wonderful GP hooks and snippets plugin (both CSS and PHP).

Like the WordPress theme I have running on woorkup? You’re in luck. Tom asked if he can make a replica of woorkup to your brand new GeneratePress blog library. I am happy to let you know that you can now put in my woorkup motif on your GeneratePress site with just a single click! It is called the Marketer motif. Get started with a great blog layout instantly.

brianjackson.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

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

brianjackson.io New GeneratePress Theme

I had been Able to replicate the whole appearance 100% 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 few plugins that 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 motif from Array Themes. It is a fairly basic minimal site, as we simply use it for our LLC. Since you can see it already loaded pretty quickly. Best Premium WordPress Themes 2016

forgemedia.io New GeneratePress Theme

I was Able to move everything over and get it looking exactly how I wanted it in under one hour. And as you can see it loads faster! Amazing. I managed 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 websites to it (which comprises some EDD e-commerce sites). Once I have my 9 sites all running in GP without any child topics, my life will be a breeze! The developer has revived my faith in multi-purpose subjects , which when done the right way, can actually perform quicker.

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

What GeneratePress Is Great For…

GeneratePress Is the ideal option for performance-focused users that wish to have the ability to customize and control precisely how their site appears.

You Can make GeneratePress perform pretty much anything. And since GeneratePress has a focus on performance, the site that you build will have a fantastic foundation to make it load quickly.

Since Of that, those who assemble WordPress sites 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 Fantastic Fit If…

…you Want something that will immediately look perfect from the box.

For Example, if you realize you want to create a style blog, you might be happier choosing a market theme that is developed exclusively for trend bloggers.

Even though GeneratePress is becoming a lot simpler to use, as a result of its pre-built Website Library, GeneratePress still looks very barebones if you initially install it.

So To make GeneratePress look how you would like it to, you will most likely need to go in and personalize things. And while the significant benefit of GeneratePress is how customizable it is, many users, especially casual users, do not like having to make those changes themselves.

GeneratePress Features Which Make It Unique

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

Lots Of Customization Options In The Real-Time WordPress Customizer

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

GeneratePress Uses the WordPress Customizer for customization, and this can be convenient because you will be able to see all the changes that you make in real time.

The Free variant of GeneratePress provides you adequate options, but should you have GeneratePress Premium, you’ll have the ability to customize nearly everything about your site.

For Example, if you go into the Layout area, you can configure comprehensive settings to your:

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

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

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

All In all, GeneratePress will give you a lot 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 the way the settings come together, you will have complete control on how your website appears.

Optimized Performance And Quick Page Load Times

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

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

Put That together, and you obtain a superfast-loading motif. How fast? To give you a sense, I conducted a little test.

First, I put up an empty website using a random popular WordPress.org theme (Envo Magazine). After testing its functionality with Pingdom, it

Had a performance tier of 77
Loaded in 1.05 seconds
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 triggered GeneratePress on the same test site without altering 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 do that same test with other themes, you are going to continue to see that GeneratePress is among the fastest-loading WordPress topics in life. Best Premium WordPress Themes 2016

Other Helpful Premium Extensions, Plus A Modular Approach

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

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

To Remain lightweight, GeneratePress also provides you a modular port where you can select and choose exactly which characteristics you would like to activate.

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

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

In The last, you needed to construct GeneratePress sites from a blank canvas regardless of what, which made the motif difficult for casual users to install.

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

You Can import them right from your 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 Comprehensive Control Over Each Piece Of Content

With Most themes, each page and post will use the same configurations for the most part. You may 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 box for each and every page and post:

You Can use this meta box to:

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

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

By Disabling certain components, you are able to produce the correct baseline for your own page builder layout, which makes it effortless to create custom articles as needed. Best Premium WordPress Themes 2016

GeneratePress Replies: Cheap And Works On Unlimited Sites

The Heart GeneratePress theme can be obtained for free at WordPress.org.

Nevertheless, If you’re serious about using GeneratePress, I believe you should purchase the GeneratePress Premium plugin, as that is what makes the theme so elastic. The free version does not give you almost as many configurations from the WordPress Customizer. And you will also lose out on the premade Site Library.

GeneratePress Premium is also still fairly reasonably priced. It costs just $39.95, and that gives you use on infinite websites . You’ll also get a 40% discount if you want to renew to continue receiving support and updates after the initial year (you can, of course, continue using GeneratePress following the initial year without beating — you won’t get any more updates).

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

Conclusion

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

If You want a niche-specific theme, you can probably save time by buying a theme that satisfies your needs for your market out of day one.

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

Additionally, It’s among those fastest-loading WordPress themes that you will find. So if you’re seeking the best performance possible, utilizing GeneratePress as your WordPress site’s base is a good decision.

If You combine it with fast-loading hosting, you shouldn’t have any problem making your site load in under one second. Best Premium WordPress Themes 2016