Background Best WordPress Theme Authors

Over the past 10 years, I’ve used a great deal of different WordPress topics and have been really disappointed. Up until recently, I had been using MyThemeShop, that was fairly good. However, I still had to do a lot of customization to allow it to 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 is by far the best WordPress theme I’ve found in a decade . I had been blown away and am now moving all my sites to GeneratePress. I’ll enter exactly why in my comprehensive GeneratePress review below. And if you are wondering, yes I have attempted Genesis, Astra, OceanWP, Avada, X motif, Divi as well as many other lightweight and heavier multi-purpose themes. Best WordPress Theme Authors

To Get started, Click here to download GeneratePress.

GeneratePress Review

GeneratePress is a free WordPress theme created by Tom Usborne, a programmer from Canada. I have really seen it for many years in the WordPress repository. Most of you realize that I’m 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 isn’t that great, or not supported for long. However, in this case, this was a mistake. The theme now has over half a million downloads, 80,000+ busy installs, with over 500 5-star evaluations. So obviously Tom is doing some thing right here.

I Actually 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 programmer was thinking exactly how I was imagining 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 subject, since it’s worth very penny. Actually, Tom, in the event that you ever read this and so are visiting Scottsdale, Arizona, coffees 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 greater outcomes in SERPs.

Dramatic integration using 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 support back to IE8.

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

Translation ready.

Font wonderful built in.

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

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

The Documentation is also unbelievable. Besides have good documentation on their website, the theme has been around long enough that what I Googled throughout the setup procedure was found inside a few seconds from their forum.

Diving Into GeneratePress

Now it’s Time to the fun part! I always test a brand new theme right out of the box with no customizations to just see how quickly the base is. This tells me a lot of what I could expect by the time that I add everything to it. Running the inventory GeneratePress WordPress motif 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 produce a lot of big files, but this isn’t the case. You may tell that Tom actually worked hard on ensuring that every record packed in GeneratePress is as little as possible. With HTTP/2, the number of documents isn’t as important. But the size is! Have a peek at a few 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

This is a developer that cares about functionality! And I’ve Seen the same during all of the premium add-ons. They are literally as small as you can possibly get them. In reality, Font Awesome is probably the biggest file included. And that is not even his. Together with Font Awesome 5 coming around the corner, we can anticipate that to secure smaller also.

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

If You are curious, I am using the next add-ons on this website:

Blog

Colors

Hooks

Page Header

Spacing

Typography

No Child Theme Needed

One of The best features of GeneratePress is I no longer need to use a young child theme. This makes my life so much simpler. No longer editing my functions.php or header.php files. I can literally update my GeneratePress theme this very minute rather than shed one customization. The hooks add-on certainly can help make this possible. It permits you to add custom code/PHP anywhere throughout your WordPress website. Best WordPress Theme Authors

Other Things I Love About GeneratePress

On every Page/post that you have a lot of alternatives. You can alter the sidebar design and the footer widgets.

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

The WordPress customizer choices is really where GeneratePress really shines! Remember, lots of these choices are permitted 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 suggest grabbing is your free Lightweight Grid Columns. Not to my surprise, this is also created by precisely the exact same developer as GeneratePress. It enables you a super simple way to add responsive columns into any page or post. Features include:

Desktop grid width

Tablet grid width

Mobile grid width

Add Customized classes

Insert custom inline designs

Equal height columns

This is An example under:

You might want to Also grab his incredible WP Display Posts plugin too. View my featured posts on the sidebar of this site? That’s 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 posts, recent articles, etc.. I’m 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 edition of GeneratePress allows you to do all kinds of things in terms of design. Consider it like a webpage builder without the bloat. GeneratePress is definitely not only for blogs! I’m in fact using GeneratePress for our ecommerce site (perfmatters.io) that is operating Easy Digital Downloads. Feel free to look it over. However, as you can see below, it looks like a site.

Speed Tests

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

woorkup.com Old MyThemeShop Theme

My old MyThemeShop motif was pretty fast, but I spent a great deal of time scrutinizing it. In fact, I’ve gotten a great deal of emails from you guys asking me to publish all of my customizations. My advice now 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 remember, I do not have a kid motif. All the customizations were made 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 create a replica of woorkup to your brand new GeneratePress site library. I’m happy to allow you to know that now you can put in my woorkup motif in your own GeneratePress website with just a single click! It is known as the Marketer motif. Get started with a fantastic blog design 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 fairly basic minimum website, since I don’t use it for much. As you can see it already loaded pretty quickly.

brianjackson.io New GeneratePress Theme

I was Able to replicate the entire look 100% in GeneratePress in under one hour. And as you can see it loads faster! Amazing. I was able to eliminate a couple plugins that weren’t needed because of GP.

forgemedia.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

I also Moved over our business site, forgemedia.io, to GeneratePress. Previously I was using a theme from Array Themes. It is a fairly basic minimum site, as we just use it to our LLC. As you can see it already loaded pretty fast. Best WordPress Theme Authors

forgemedia.io New GeneratePress Theme

I was Able to again move everything over and get it looking just how I needed it in under an hour. And since you can see it loads even faster! Amazing. I was able 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 my sites for this (which includes several EDD e-commerce sites). After I’ve got my 9 websites all running in GP with no child topics, my life will be a breeze! The programmer has restored my faith in multi-purpose themes, which when done the right way, can actually perform faster.

And The best news is, I finally have a thousand more options to choose from than I did before.

What GeneratePress Is Great For…

GeneratePress Is the perfect 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 website that you build will have a fantastic base to make it load quickly.

Since 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 kind of site.

However GeneratePress Might Not Be A Good Fit If…

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

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

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

So To make GeneratePress look how you want it to, you’ll almost certainly need to go in and customize 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 some of the specific characteristics that explain why GeneratePress is indeed popular.

Plenty Of Customization Options From The Real-Time WordPress Customizer

Past Performance, another area 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 of the changes that you create in real time.

The Free variant of GeneratePress gives you decent options, but if you own GeneratePress Premium, you’ll have the ability to customize pretty much all about your website.

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

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

Similarly, That the Typography place enables you to control the font for each and every element on your website, including buttons:

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

All Whatsoever, GeneratePress will provide you much more customization options from the WordPress Customizer compared to most other themes. This amount of detail might be a bit overwhelming if you are a beginner. But as soon as you realize how the settings come together, you’ll have complete control on how your site looks.

Optimized Performance And Fast Page Load Times

Around All of its features, GeneratePress always includes a focus on excellent performance and clean code. The whole motif is less than 30 kB, which will be about as little as you are ever going to find for a WordPress theme. Even most other optimized WordPress topics are still 200+ kB. And some badly coded topics can even surpass 1 MB!

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

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

First, I put up an empty site utilizing a haphazard popular WordPress.org theme (Envo Magazine). After testing its performance 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’s Not bad at all! However, GeneratePress can do better.

Next, I activated GeneratePress on exactly the exact same test site without altering anything else. Here is 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% fewer

If You perform the exact same test with different themes, you’ll continue to find that GeneratePress is among the fastest-loading WordPress topics in existence. Best WordPress Theme Authors

Other Helpful 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 exceptional feature that allows you create custom hooks, page headers, or layout templates.
Page Header — allows you create a unique page header onto a per-page basis.
Sections — this is kind of like lightweight page construction. It lets you create different”sections” onto a page, each with their own layout and column preferences.

To Stay lightweight, GeneratePress also provides you a modular port where you could pick and choose what characteristics you want to activate.

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

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

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

Earlier In 2018, however, the developer added a fresh Website Library feature for GeneratePress Premium users that allows you easily import any among 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 couple buttons to import a demo site.

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

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

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

You Can utilize this meta box to:

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

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

By Disabling certain elements, you are able to create the proper baseline for your own page builder design, making it easy to create custom content as needed. Best WordPress Theme Authors

GeneratePress Replies: Affordable And Works On Unlimited Sites

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

Nevertheless, If you are serious about utilizing GeneratePress, I feel you should buy the GeneratePress Premium plugin, as that’s what makes the theme so flexible. The free version doesn’t give you almost as numerous configurations 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 sites. You’ll also get a 40% discount if you would like to renew to keep on receiving support and updates following the first year (you can, of course, continue using GeneratePress after the initial year without beating — you won’t get any more updates).

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

Summary

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

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

However, If you are willing to spend some time changing settings, GeneratePress’ style controls give you the flexibility to flip it into any sort of WordPress website. Or, you may even have the ability to find a starter website that fits your needs to save a little time.

Additionally, It’s among the fastest-loading WordPress themes that you will locate. Therefore, if you’re looking for the best performance possible, utilizing GeneratePress as your WordPress site’s foundation is a great decision.

If You combine it with fast-loading hosting, so you should have no problem making your website load in under one second. Best WordPress Theme Authors