Intro Best WordPress Template For Products

Over the past 10 decades, I have used a lot of different WordPress themes and have been really disappointed. Up till recently, I had been utilizing MyThemeShop, which was pretty good. But I had to do 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 is by far the finest WordPress theme I’ve discovered in 10 years. I had been blown away and am now moving all my sites to GeneratePress. I will go into precisely why in my in-depth GeneratePress review below. And if you’re wondering, yes I have tried Genesis, Astra, OceanWP, Avada, X motif, Divi as well as several other lightweight and thicker multicolored themes. Best WordPress Template For Products

To Get started, Click here to download GeneratePress.

GeneratePress Review

GeneratePress is a totally free WordPress theme made by Tom Usborne, a developer from Canada. I’ve actually seen it for years from the WordPress repository. Most of you realize that I am pretty picky when it comes to web performance, so I tend to dismiss everything in the repository. Typically because a lot of things on there isn’t that good, or not supported for long. Nonetheless, in this circumstance, this was a mistake. The motif now has over 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 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 will go into that more below, but let us first look at some of the qualities. I will be covering the superior edition of the theme, since it’s worth very penny. In fact, Tom, if you read this and are visiting Scottsdale, Arizona, java on me.

Features

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

Responsive, looks fantastic across all devices.

Schema built-in, for better outcomes in SERPs.

Impressive integration with all the WordPress Customizer. I have not 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. Great browser service back to IE8.

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

Resumes prepared.

Font wonderful built-in.

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

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

The Documentation can be unbelievable. Besides have great documentation on their website, the theme has existed long enough that everything I Googled throughout the setup procedure was found inside a couple of seconds in their forum.

Going Deep 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 fast the foundation is. This tells me a lot of what I can expect by the time I add everything for this. Running the stock GeneratePress WordPress theme on Kinsta hosting clocked in at a whopping 265 ms loading time. I was quite impressed.

One Thing I was concerned about with GeneratePress was that the modular design was going to generate a whole lot of big files, but this isn’t the situation. You may tell that Tom actually worked hard on ensuring that every file loaded in GeneratePress is as small as possible. With HTTP/2, the amount of files isn’t as significant. However, the size is! Have a look 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 developer that cares about functionality! And I’ve Seen exactly the same during all the premium add-ons. They’re literally as small as you can possibly get them. In reality, Font Awesome is probably the largest file contained. And that isn’t even his. With Font Awesome 5 coming around the corner, we can anticipate this to secure smaller too.

The premium add-ons Are installation in what I’d call a modular design. You can activate/deactivate whatever you are not using to guarantee they do not load on your site. Since the co-developer of the perfmatters plugin that has a script manager built-in, I felt at home for this. Everything ought to be made this way.

If You are curious, 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 characteristics of GeneratePress is that I no more have to use a Child theme. This makes my life much easier. No longer editing my functions.php or header.php files. I can literally upgrade my GeneratePress theme this very minute rather than lose one customization. The hooks add-on certainly helps make this possible. It permits you to incorporate custom code/PHP anywhere throughout your WordPress site. Best WordPress Template For Products

Other Things I Love About GeneratePress

On each Page/post you have a lot of alternatives. You can alter the sidebar layout and the footer widgets.

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

The WordPress customizer options is really where GeneratePress really shines! Remember, a lot of these choices are permitted from the premium add-ons. I can’t show you everything, otherwise, we’d be here all day. But let me show you few which really come in handy.

Responsive Columns

Another Plugin I highly recommend grabbing is your free Lightweight Grid Columns. Not to my surprise, this is also created by precisely the same developer as GeneratePress. It enables you a super simple way to incorporate responsive columns to any page or article. Features include:

Desktop grid thickness

Tablet grid thickness

Mobile grid thickness

Add custom courses

Add custom inline styles

Equal height columns

Here is An example under:

You might want to Also catch his amazing WP Show Posts plugin too. See 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 might also get it show past modified/updated articles, recent posts, etc.. I am using the free version and it works terrific.

To Begin, 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 in terms of design. Consider it like a page builder with no bloat. GeneratePress is certainly not just for blogs! I’m in fact using GeneratePress for our ecommerce site (perfmatters.io) which is operating Easy Digital Downloads. Don’t hesitate to look it over. However, as you can see below, it looks like a blog.

Speed Tests

For those Of those who are regular readers, you likely did not even notice that I changed the entire 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 already pretty fast, but I invested a lot of time customizing it. In fact, I’ve gotten a lot of emails from you guys asking me to publish all my customizations. My advice today is, simply get GeneratePress!

woorkup.com New GeneratePress Theme

Together with the New GeneratePress motif I managed to achieve faster speeds and 600 fewer lines of code! And remember, I do not have a kid theme. Each of the customizations were made using the awesome 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 could make a copy of woorkup to your new GeneratePress blog library. I am pleased to allow you to know that you can now install my woorkup theme in your GeneratePress site with just a single click! It is called the Marketer theme. Get started with a fantastic blog design instantly.

brianjackson.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

I also Moved over my personal site, brianjackson.io, to GeneratePress. Previously I was using a motif from Array Themes. It is a fairly basic minimum site, since I do not use it to get much. Since you can see it loaded pretty quickly.

brianjackson.io New GeneratePress Theme

I was Able to duplicate the whole look 100 percent in GeneratePress in under one hour. And since you can see it loads faster! Amazing. I was able to eliminate a couple plugins that weren’t needed due to GP.

forgemedia.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

Additionally, I Moved over our organization website, forgemedia.io, to GeneratePress. Previously I was using a theme from Array Themes. It is a fairly basic minimal website, as we just use it for our LLC. Since you can see it already loaded pretty quickly. Best WordPress Template For Products

forgemedia.io New GeneratePress Theme

I had been Able to again move everything over and get it looking just how I needed it in under an 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 total page burden 2x!

I can not express my Excitement about finding GeneratePress and I’m moving over all of my websites for this (which includes several EDD e-commerce websites ). After I have my 9 websites all running in GP without any child themes, my entire life will be a breeze! The developer has restored my faith in multi-purpose themes, which when done the right way, can actually perform faster.

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

What GeneratePress Is Great For…

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

You Can make GeneratePress perform 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 quickly.

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

But GeneratePress Might Not Be A Fantastic Combination If…

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

For Example, if you realize you wish to produce a fashion blog, you might be happier choosing a niche theme that is developed exclusively for fashion bloggers.

Even though GeneratePress is becoming a great deal simpler to use, as a result of its pre-built Website Library, GeneratePress still seems very barebones if you first install it.

So To create GeneratePress look how you want it to, you will almost certainly will need to go in and personalize things. And though the substantial benefit of GeneratePress is how customizable it is, some users, especially casual users, do not like having to make those changes themselves.

GeneratePress Features Which Make It Unique

Here Are some of the particular features that clarify why GeneratePress is indeed popular.

Lots Of Customization Options From The Real-Time WordPress Customizer

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

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

The Free version of GeneratePress provides you decent options, but if you own GeneratePress Premium, you’ll be able to customize nearly everything about your website.

For Example, if you go into the Design region, you can configure detailed settings for your:

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

Likewise, That the Typography place enables you to control the font for every single element on your website, such as buttons:

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

All Whatsoever, GeneratePress will provide you much more customization choices in the WordPress Customizer compared to most other themes. This level of detail might be a little overwhelming if you’re a beginner. But once you understand how the settings come together, you’ll have full control on how your website looks.

Optimized Performance And Fast Page Load Times

Around All of its attributes, GeneratePress consistently has a focus on excellent performance and tidy code. The entire theme is less than 30 kB, which 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 a few poorly coded themes can even surpass 1 MB!

GeneratePress Also does not have any code dependencies, which helps you avoid the render obstructing error that Google Pagespeed Insights often cites.

Place That together, and you get a superfast-loading theme. How fast? To give you a sense, I ran a small test.

First, I put up a vacant site utilizing a random popular WordPress.org motif (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 at all! However, GeneratePress can perform.

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

Had a performance tier of 87, 10 points better
Loaded in 666 ms, ~37% quicker
Had a page size of 26.8 kB, ~90% smaller
Had 9 asks, ~40% fewer

If You perform that same test with different topics, you’ll continue to see that GeneratePress is among those fastest-loading WordPress themes in existence. Best WordPress Template For Products

Other Useful Premium Extensions, Plus Much Modular Approach

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

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

To Remain lightweight, GeneratePress also provides you a modular interface where you could pick and choose exactly which features you would like to activate.

That Way, you don’t need to slow down your site for a feature which you’re never going to use.

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

In The last, you had to build GeneratePress sites from a blank canvas no matter what, which left the theme difficult for casual users to set up.

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 directly 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 Detailed Control Over Each Piece Of Content

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

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

You Can use this meta box to:

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

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

By Disabling certain elements, you are in a position to create the proper baseline for your page builder layout, which makes it effortless to create custom articles as needed. Best WordPress Template For Products

GeneratePress Replies: Affordable And Works On Unlimited Sites

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

That said, If you are serious about using GeneratePress, I feel you should purchase the GeneratePress Premium plugin, as that’s what produces the theme so elastic. The free version doesn’t give you nearly as many settings in the WordPress Customizer. And you will also lose out on the premade Site Library.

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

When You consider that the normal premium WordPress theme will often cost around $60, GeneratePress offers a fantastic value.

Wrap-up

As I said, I don’t think GeneratePress is for everyone.

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

But If you’re ready to spend some time altering settings, GeneratePress’ mode controls give you the flexibility to flip it into any type of WordPress site. Or, you might even be able to locate a starter website that fits your needs to save a little time.

Additionally, It is one of those fastest-loading WordPress topics that you will find. Therefore, if you’re seeking the best performance possible, utilizing GeneratePress as your WordPress site’s base is a good choice.

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