Background Best WordPress Template For Reviews

Within the past ten years, I have used a lot of different WordPress themes and have been really disappointed. Up till recently, I was using MyThemeShop, which was pretty excellent. But I still had to do a great deal of customization to make it perform and work the way I needed it to. A couple of weeks ago I decided to provide GeneratePress a try, and let me just say, it’s undoubtedly the best WordPress theme I have found in a decade . I was dismissed and am moving all my websites to GeneratePress. I will enter exactly why in my comprehensive GeneratePress review below. And if you are wondering, yes I’ve attempted Genesis, Astra, OceanWP, Avada, X motif, Divi in addition to several other lightweight and thicker multi-purpose themes. Best WordPress Template For Reviews

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 many years in the WordPress repository. Most of you know that I’m pretty picky when it comes to web performance, so I have a tendency to ignore everything from the repository. Typically because a lot of stuff on there isn’t that good, or not supported for long. Nonetheless, in this circumstance, this was a mistake. The motif currently has more than half a million downloads, 80,000+ busy matches, with over 500 5-star evaluations. So clearly 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 programmer was thinking precisely how I was envisioning a theme should get the job done. And I will go into that more below, but let’s first look at a number of the features. I’m going to be covering the premium edition of the theme, since it’s worth . Actually, Tom, in the event that you read this and are visiting Scottsdale, Arizona, java on me.

Features

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

Responsive, looks great across all devices.

Schema built-in, for better outcomes in SERPs.

Dramatic integration with the WordPress Customizer. I have not been a fan of the customizer previously, but Tom does it right.

Compatible with 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 want to dive into even more customizations, these are a great combo. I’ve also read that people using Beaver Builder have had success.

Translation ready.

Font wonderful built-in.

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

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

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

Diving Into GeneratePress

Now it’s Time for the fun part! I test a brand 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 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 concerned about with GeneratePress was that the modular design was going to generate a lot of big files, but this isn’t the situation. You may tell that Tom actually worked hard on ensuring every file packed in GeneratePress is as small as possible. With HTTP/2, the number of documents is not as significant. But the dimensions is! Have a look at some of the center 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 programmer that cares about performance! And I’ve Seen exactly the same throughout all of the premium add-ons. They are as small as possible get them. In fact, Font Awesome is probably the largest file contained. And that isn’t even his. With Font Awesome 5 coming around the corner, we could expect that to secure smaller too.

The premium add-ons Are setup in what I would call a modular layout. You can activate/deactivate whatever you aren’t using to ensure they do not load on your website. As the co-developer of this perfmatters plugin which has a script supervisor built-in, I felt at home with this. Everything ought to be designed this way.

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

Blog

Shades

Copyright

Hooks

Page Header

Spacing

Typography

No Child Theme Needed

One of The best characteristics of GeneratePress is that I no longer 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 theme this very moment and not lose a single customization. The hooks add-on definitely can help make this possible. It allows you to incorporate custom code/PHP everywhere throughout your WordPress site. Best WordPress Template For Reviews

Other Things I Love About GeneratePress

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

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

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

Responsive Columns

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

Desktop grid width

Tablet grid thickness

Mobile grid thickness

Add Customized courses

Insert custom inline styles

Equal height columns

This is An example below:

You May Want to Also grab his incredible WP Show Posts plugin also. View 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 can also have it show last modified/updated posts, 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 Sections add-on in the premium edition of GeneratePress lets you do all kinds of things concerning design. Think of it like a page builder with no bloat. GeneratePress is definitely not only for blogs! I am in fact using GeneratePress for our ecommerce site (perfmatters.io) that is operating Easy Digital Downloads. Don’t hesitate to look it over. But as you can see below, it looks nothing like a site.

Speed Tests

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

woorkup.com Old MyThemeShop Theme

My older MyThemeShop theme was pretty fast, but I spent a great deal 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 now is, simply get GeneratePress!

woorkup.com New GeneratePress Theme

Together with the New GeneratePress theme I was able to achieve faster speeds and 600 fewer lines of code! And remember, I don’t have a child motif. Each of 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 are in luck. Tom asked if he can create a replica of woorkup to your new GeneratePress site library. I am happy to allow you to know that now you can put in my woorkup theme on your GeneratePress site with just a click! It’s known as the Marketer motif. Get started with a fantastic blog layout instantly.

brianjackson.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

Additionally, I Moved within my private website, brianjackson.io, to GeneratePress. Previously I was using a theme from Array Themes. It is a pretty basic minimal website, since I don’t use it to get much. Since you can see it loaded pretty quickly.

brianjackson.io New GeneratePress Theme

I had been Able to duplicate the whole look 100 percent 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 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 motif from Array Themes. It’s a fairly basic minimal site, as we simply use it for our LLC. Since you can see it loaded pretty quickly. Best WordPress Template For Reviews

forgemedia.io New GeneratePress Theme

I was Able to again move everything over and get it looking exactly how I needed it in under one 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 weight 2x!

I can’t express my Excitement about locating GeneratePress and I’m moving over all of my websites to it (which comprises several EDD e-commerce websites ). After I have my 9 sites all running in GP with no child themes, my life is going to be a breeze! The developer has restored my faith in multi-purpose themes, and that when done the right way, can actually perform quicker.

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

What GeneratePress Is Great For…

GeneratePress Is the ideal alternative for performance-focused users who want to be able to customize and control precisely how their site looks.

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

Because Of that, people who build WordPress sites for a living love GeneratePress. They’ll normally pair it with a WordPress page builder and use it for literally any kind of website.

However GeneratePress Might Not Be A Good Combination If…

…you Need something which will immediately look perfect from the box.

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

Even though GeneratePress has gotten a great deal simpler to use, thanks to its pre-built Website Library, GeneratePress still seems very barebones if you initially install it.

So To make GeneratePress look how you want it to, you’ll most likely will need to go in and personalize things. And though the significant advantage of GeneratePress is how customizable it is, many users, particularly casual users, do not like having to make those changes .

GeneratePress Features Which Make It Unique

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

Plenty Of Customization Options In The Real-Time WordPress Customizer

Past Functionality, another area where GeneratePress does nicely is its customization options.

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

The Free version of GeneratePress provides you adequate options, but should you have GeneratePress Premium, you will have the ability to customize nearly all about your website.

For Example, if you go in the Design area, you can configure detailed settings to yourown:

• Header — you can move your header round and change its own styling
• Navigation — GeneratePress gives you two different navigation options, including sticky menus
• Sidebar design — you can use a Couple of sidebars
• Blog post layout — such as featured image size, metadata, etc..
• Footer layout — just like the number of widgets to include

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

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

All In all, GeneratePress will provide you much more customization choices in the WordPress Customizer compared to most other themes. This amount of detail may be a bit overwhelming if you are a beginner. But as soon as you realize how the settings come together, you’ll have full control over how your website looks.

Optimized Performance And Quick Page Load Times

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

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

Place That collectively, and you get a superfast-loading theme. How quickly? To give you an idea, I conducted a small test.

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

• Had a performance tier of 77
• Loaded in 1.05 moments
• Had a page size of 243.9 kB
• Had 15 asks

That is Not bad in any way! But GeneratePress can do better.

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

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

If You do the exact same test with other topics, you’ll continue to find that GeneratePress is among the fastest-loading WordPress themes in existence. Best WordPress Template For Reviews

Other Helpful Premium Extensions, Plus A Modular Approach

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

• Elements — a unique feature which allows you create custom 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 different”sections” onto a page, each with their own layout and column preferences.

To Stay lightweight, GeneratePress also gives you a modular interface where you can pick and choose exactly which characteristics you want to trigger.

That Way, you don’t have to slow down your site for a quality that you’re never going to use.

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

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

Earlier In 2018, though, the developer added a new Site Library feature for GeneratePress Premium users that allows you easily import any one of the 25+ pre-built demonstration websites .

You Can import them right from the WordPress dashboard.

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

Page-Level Settings Provide You Comprehensive Control Over Each Bit Of Content

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

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

You Can use this meta box to:

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

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

By Disabling certain components, you are able to create the proper baseline for your own page builder design, making it effortless to create custom articles as needed. Best WordPress Template For Reviews

GeneratePress Pricing: Cheap And Works On Unlimited Sites

The Heart GeneratePress motif is available at no cost at WordPress.org.

Nevertheless, If you’re serious about utilizing GeneratePress, I believe you need to buy the GeneratePress Premium plugin, as that’s what makes the theme so flexible. The free version does not give you nearly as many settings in the WordPress Customizer. And you’ll also miss out on the premade Site Library.

GeneratePress Premium is also still fairly affordable. It costs just $39.95, which gives you use on infinite sites. You will also get a 40% discount if you would like to renew to continue receiving support and updates following the initial year (you can, of course, continue using GeneratePress following the first year without renewing — you won’t receive any more upgrades ).

When You believe the normal premium WordPress theme will often cost around $60, GeneratePress provides a fantastic price.

Wrap-up

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

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

But If you’re willing to spend time altering settings, GeneratePress’ style controls give you the flexibility to turn it into any sort of WordPress website. Or, you might even have the ability to locate a starter website that fits your needs to save a little time.

Additionally, It is one of the fastest-loading WordPress themes that you will locate. So if you’re seeking the best performance possible, utilizing GeneratePress as your WordPress site’s foundation is a great choice.

If You combine it with fast-loading hosting, so you should have no difficulty making your website load in under one second. Best WordPress Template For Reviews

To Begin, Click here to download GeneratePress.