Intro Best Template WordPress Agency

Within the past 10 years, I’ve used a great deal of different WordPress topics and have been very disappointed. Up until recently, I was using MyThemeShop, which was fairly excellent. However, I still had to do a lot of customization to make it do and work how 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 best WordPress theme I’ve discovered in 10 years. I had been dismissed and am moving all of my websites to GeneratePress. I will go into precisely why in my comprehensive GeneratePress review under. And if you are wondering, yes I have attempted Genesis, Astra, OceanWP, Avada, X motif, Divi in addition to many other lightweight and heavier multicolored themes. Best Template WordPress Agency

To Begin, Click here to download GeneratePress.

GeneratePress Review

GeneratePress is a totally free WordPress theme created by Tom Usborne, a programmer from Canada. I have actually seen it for years in the WordPress repository. Most of you realize that I am fairly picky when it comes to web performance, and so I have a tendency to ignore everything in the repository. Typically because a great deal of things on there isn’t that great, 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+ busy matches, with over 500 5-star ratings. So clearly Tom is doing some thing right here.

I Actually installed the free version of the motif and in a matter of 15 minutes purchased the superior version. I could tell right off the bat, the programmer was thinking precisely how I was imagining a theme should get the job done. And I’ll go into that more below, but let’s first look at a number of the features. I’m going to be covering the superior edition of the subject, since it’s worth . Actually, Tom, in the event that you ever read this and so are visiting Scottsdale, Arizona, coffees on me.

Features

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

Responsive, looks fantastic across all of the devices.

Schema built-in, for greater outcomes in SERPs.

Impressive integration using all the WordPress Customizer. I have not been a lover of this customizer in the past, but Tom does it correctly.

Compatible with popular plugins, Yoast SEO, WooCommerce, EDD, BuddyPress, bbPress, and WPML. Fantastic 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 are a terrific combo. I’ve also read that individuals using Beaver Builder have had success.

Resumes prepared.

Font awesome built in.

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

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

The Documentation is also incredible. Besides have good documentation on their site, the subject has been around long enough that everything I wholeheartedly throughout the setup process was found inside a few seconds in their forum.

Diving Into GeneratePress

Now it’s Time for the fun part! I test a new theme right out of the box without any 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 for this. Running the stock GeneratePress WordPress theme 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 design was going to produce a whole lot of big files, but that is not the situation. You may tell that Tom actually worked hard on making sure that every file packed in GeneratePress is as little as possible. With HTTP/2, the number of documents is not as significant. However, the size is! Take a peek at a few 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

That is a developer that cares about performance! And I’ve Seen exactly the same during all of the premium add-ons. They are literally as small as you can possibly get them. In fact, Font Awesome is most likely the biggest file included. And that is not even his. With Font Awesome 5 coming round the cornerwe can anticipate that 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 ensure they don’t load on your website. As the co-developer of the perfmatters plugin which has a script manager built, I felt at home for this. Everything ought to be made this way.

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

Website

Colors

Hooks

Page Header

Spacing

Typography

No Child Theme Needed

One of The best characteristics of GeneratePress is I no longer need to use a Child theme. This makes my life so much simpler. No more editing my functions.php or header.php documents. I can literally update my GeneratePress motif this exact moment rather than lose a single customization. The hooks add-on certainly helps make this possible. It permits you to incorporate custom code/PHP anywhere throughout your WordPress site. Best Template WordPress Agency

Other Things I Love About GeneratePress

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

You Can easily swap a page involving the default to a full width page, as well as disable elements.

The WordPress customizer choices is really where GeneratePress really shines! Bear in mind, a lot of these choices are permitted from the premium add-ons. I can’t show you everything, otherwise, we would be here all day. However, allow me to 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 can be made by the same programmer as GeneratePress. It enables you a super simple way to incorporate responsive columns to any page or article. Features include:

Desktop grid width

Tablet grid width

Mobile grid width

Insert custom classes

Add custom inline designs

Equal height columns

This is An example under:

You might want to Also grab his amazing WP Show Posts plugin too. See my featured articles on the sidebar of this site? That’s using the WP Show Posts plugin. I have it set to show posts from a specific”featured” category. You can also have it show last modified/updated articles, recent articles, etc.. I am using the free version and it works great.

To Get started, Click here to download GeneratePress.

Sections Add-on

The Segments add-in in the premium version of GeneratePress allows you to do all kinds of things in terms of design. Think of it like a webpage builder with no bloat. GeneratePress is certainly not only for blogs! I’m in fact utilizing GeneratePress to our ecommerce website (perfmatters.io) which is running Easy Digital Downloads. Feel free to look it over. However, as you can see below, it looks nothing like a site.

Speed Tests

For all those Of you that are regular readers, you probably didn’t even notice that I changed the whole motif that forces woorkup.com. It only took me about an hour to get 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 theme was pretty quickly, but I invested a great deal of time customizing it. In reality, I have gotten a great deal of emails from you guys asking me to print all my customizations. My advice today is, simply get GeneratePress!

woorkup.com New GeneratePress Theme

With the New GeneratePress theme I managed to achieve faster speeds and 600 fewer lines of code! And keep in mind, I do not have a child theme. All the customizations were created with the awesome 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 could 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 in your own GeneratePress website with just a click! It’s called the Marketer motif. Get started with 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 theme from Array Themes. It is a pretty basic minimal site, as I don’t use it to get much. As you can see it already loaded pretty fast.

brianjackson.io New GeneratePress Theme

I was Able to replicate the entire appearance 100% in GeneratePress in under one hour. And since you can see it loads faster! Amazing. I was able to get rid of a few plugins that weren’t needed due to GP.

forgemedia.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

I also Moved over our business site, forgemedia.io, to GeneratePress. Previously I was using a motif from Array Themes. It is a pretty basic minimal site, as we just use it to our LLC. As you can see it loaded pretty quickly. Best Template WordPress Agency

forgemedia.io New GeneratePress Theme

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

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

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

What GeneratePress Is Great For…

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

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

Because Of that, people who assemble WordPress websites for a living love GeneratePress. They will normally 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 Want something that will instantly look perfect from the box.

For Example, if you know you wish to produce a style blog, you might be happier picking out a market theme that’s developed exclusively for trend bloggers.

While GeneratePress is becoming a lot easier to use, as a result of its pre-built Website Library, GeneratePress still seems very barebones if you initially install it.

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

GeneratePress Features That Make It Unique

Here Are a few of the particular characteristics that explain why GeneratePress is so common.

Lots Of Customization Options In The Real-Time WordPress Customizer

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

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

The Free version of GeneratePress gives you adequate possibilities, but should you have GeneratePress Premium, you’ll have the ability to customize pretty much all about your website.

For Example, if you go in the Design region, you may configure comprehensive settings for yourown:

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

Likewise, The Typography place lets you control the font to get each and every element on your website, such as buttons:

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

All In all, GeneratePress will provide you a lot more customization options from the WordPress Customizer compared to most other topics. This level of detail might be a bit overwhelming if you are a beginner. But as soon as you realize how the preferences come together, you will have complete control over how your site appears.

Optimized Performance And Fast Page Load Times

Across All its features, GeneratePress always includes a focus on excellent performance and tidy code. The entire motif is less than 30 kB, and it 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 topics can even exceed 1 MB!

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

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

First, I put up a vacant site using a random popular WordPress.org motif (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! But GeneratePress can do better.

Next, I triggered GeneratePress on exactly the exact same test website 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 asks, ~40% less

If You perform the exact same test with other themes, you’ll continue to find that GeneratePress is one of the fastest-loading WordPress themes in life. Best Template WordPress Agency

Other Useful Premium Extensions, Plus A Modular Approach

Beyond Giving you more design 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 — lets you create a unique page header onto a per-page basis.
Sections — this is kind of like lightweight page construction. It permits you to create separate”sections” onto a webpage, each with their own design and column preferences.

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

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

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

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

Earlier In 2018, however, the developer added a new Website Library attribute for GeneratePress Premium users which lets you easily import any one of those 25+ pre-built demo sites.

You Can import them right from the WordPress dashboard.

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

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

With Most themes, every page and post will use the very same settings for the most part. You might have some custom templates or formats — however you don’t have very much control past that.

GeneratePress Changes that by providing you a brand new Layout meta 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 the number of footer widgets to use
Disable certain components, like your header, navigation menu, post 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’re using a WordPress site builder.

By Disabling certain components, you are in a position to create the correct baseline for your own page builder layout, making it effortless to create custom content as needed. Best Template WordPress Agency

GeneratePress Replies: Affordable And Works On Unlimited Sites

The Core GeneratePress theme is available at no cost at WordPress.org.

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

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

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

Summary

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

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

However, If you’re ready to spend some time changing settings, 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 some time.

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

If You blend it with fast-loading hosting, you should have no problem making your website load in under one minute. Best Template WordPress Agency