Background Best WordPress Theme For Under Construction

Over the past 10 years, I’ve used a lot of different WordPress themes and have been really disappointed. Up until recently, I was using MyThemeShop, that was fairly good. But I had to do a lot of customization to allow it to do and work the way I needed it to. A couple weeks ago I decided to provide 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 dismissed and am moving all my sites to GeneratePress. I’ll go into exactly why in my in-depth GeneratePress review below. And if you are wondering, yes I’ve tried Genesis, Astra, OceanWP, Avada, X theme, Divi in addition to several other lightweight and thicker multi-purpose themes. Best WordPress Theme For Under Construction

To Begin, Click here to download GeneratePress.

GeneratePress Review

GeneratePress is a totally free WordPress theme made by Tom Usborne, a programmer from Canada. I’ve actually seen it for years from the WordPress repository. Most of you realize that I’m fairly picky when it comes to web performance, so I have a tendency to ignore everything from the repository. Typically because a great deal of stuff on there isn’t that good, or not supported for long. Nonetheless, in this case, this was a mistake. The theme currently has more than half a million downloads, 80,000+ active installs, with over 500 5-star ratings. So clearly Tom is doing something right here.

I Actually set up the free version of the theme and in a matter of 15 minutes purchased the premium version. I could tell right off the bat, the programmer 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 some of the features. I’m going to be covering the superior edition of the subject, since it’s worth . In fact, Tom, in the event that you ever read this and so are seeing Scottsdale, Arizona, java on me.

Features

Super lightweight and quick. Modular design allowing you to enable/disable things you don’t want running. This is one of the biggest reasons I adore GeneratePress.

Responsive, looks great across all devices.

Schema built-in, for better results in SERPs.

Dramatic integration with the WordPress Customizer. I haven’t been a fan of this customizer in the past, but Tom does it right.

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

Additionally, it 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’ve also read that people using Beaver Builder have experienced success.

Resumes prepared.

Font awesome built in.

A lot of filters and hooks which make it great for developers.

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

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

Going Deep Into GeneratePress

Now it’s Time to 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 great deal of what I can expect by the time I add everything for this. Running the stock GeneratePress WordPress motif on Kinsta hosting clocked in at a whopping 265 ms loading time. I was very impressed.

One Thing I was worried about with GeneratePress was that the modular design was going to produce a whole lot of big files, but that isn’t the case. You may tell that Tom actually worked hard on making sure every record packed in GeneratePress is as little as possible. Together with HTTP/2, the number of documents is not as important. But the size is! Have 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

This is a programmer that cares about performance! And I’ve Seen exactly the same throughout each the premium add-ons. They are literally 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 cornerwe could expect this to get smaller also.

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

If You are interested, I am using the next add-ons on this site:

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 much easier. No longer editing my functions.php or header.php files. I will literally upgrade my GeneratePress theme this very moment rather than lose a single customization. The hooks add-on certainly helps make it possible. It allows you to add custom code/PHP anywhere throughout your WordPress site. Best WordPress Theme For Under Construction

Other Things I Love About GeneratePress

On each Page/post you have a lot of options. You can alter 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 components.

The WordPress customizer choices is where GeneratePress really shines! Bear in mind, lots of these choices are permitted from the premium add-ons. I can not show you everything, otherwise, we would be here all day. But let me show you couple which really come in handy.

Responsive Columns

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

Desktop grid width

Tablet grid thickness

Mobile grid thickness

Insert Customized courses

Add custom inline styles

Equal height columns

Here is An example below:

You May Want to Also catch his incredible WP Display Posts plugin also. See my featured posts on the sidebar of this website? 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 articles, recent articles, etc.. I’m 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 version of GeneratePress allows you to do all kinds of things in terms of design. Consider it like a page builder without the bloat. GeneratePress is definitely not just for blogs! I am in reality using GeneratePress for our ecommerce website (perfmatters.io) that is operating Easy Digital Downloads. Feel free to check it out. However, as you can see below, it looks nothing like a site.

Speed Tests

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

woorkup.com Old MyThemeShop Theme

My old MyThemeShop theme was pretty quickly, but I invested a great deal of time customizing it. In fact, I’ve gotten a great deal of emails from you guys asking me to publish all my customizations. My advice today is, simply get GeneratePress!

woorkup.com New GeneratePress Theme

With the New GeneratePress theme I was able 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 made with the wonderful GP hooks and snippets plugin (both CSS and PHP).

Like the WordPress theme I’ve running on woorkup? You are in luck. Tom asked if he can make a copy of woorkup to your new GeneratePress site library. I am pleased to allow you to know that you can now install my woorkup motif in your own GeneratePress site with only a single click! It’s known as the Marketer motif. Get started using a great blog design instantly.

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’s a fairly basic minimal website, as I do not use it for much. Since you can see it already loaded pretty fast.

brianjackson.io New GeneratePress Theme

I was Able to duplicate the whole appearance 100 percent in GeneratePress in under one hour. And since you can view 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 organization site, forgemedia.io, to GeneratePress. Previously I had been using a theme from Array Themes. It is a pretty basic minimal website, as we simply use it for our LLC. Since you can see it already loaded pretty quickly. Best WordPress Theme For Under Construction

forgemedia.io New GeneratePress Theme

I was Able to move everything over and get it looking exactly how I wanted it in under an hour. And as you can view it loads even faster! Amazing. I managed to eliminate a total of four plugins and it dropped my whole page weight 2x!

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

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

What GeneratePress Is Good For…

GeneratePress Is the perfect option for performance-focused users who wish to have the ability to personalize and control exactly how their site looks.

You Can make GeneratePress do pretty much anything. And since GeneratePress has a focus on functionality, the website that you build will have a great base to make it load quickly.

Since Of that, those who build WordPress sites for a living love GeneratePress. They’ll typically pair it with a WordPress page builder and use it for literally any kind of site.

But GeneratePress Might Not Be A Fantastic Fit If…

…you Want something which will immediately appear perfect out of the box.

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

While GeneratePress is becoming a lot easier to use, thanks to its pre-built Site Library, GeneratePress still looks very barebones if you first install it.

So To make GeneratePress look how you would like it to, you will most likely will need to go in and customize matters. And though the significant advantage 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 explain why GeneratePress is indeed common.

Lots Of Customization Options From The Real-Time WordPress Customizer

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

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 decent possibilities, but should you have GeneratePress Premium, you’ll be able to customize nearly everything about your website.

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

Header — you can move your header around and alter 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 picture size, metadata, etc..
Footer layout — like the number of widgets to add

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

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

All Whatsoever, GeneratePress will give you a lot more customization options from the WordPress Customizer than most other topics. This amount of detail might be a little overwhelming if you are a beginner. But once you understand the way the preferences come together, you will have complete control over how your site looks.

Optimized Performance And Fast Page Load Times

Across All its attributes, GeneratePress consistently has a focus on excellent performance and clean code. The whole theme 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 themes are still 200+ kB. And a few badly coded topics can even surpass 1 MB!

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

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

First, I put up an empty site utilizing a random popular WordPress.org motif (Envo Magazine). After testing 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! However, GeneratePress can do better.

Next, I activated GeneratePress on 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% quicker
Had a page size of 26.8 kB, ~90% smaller
Had 9 asks, ~40% less

If You perform that same test with other themes, you’ll continue to find that GeneratePress is one of the fastest-loading WordPress themes in existence. Best WordPress Theme For Under Construction

Other Helpful Premium Extensions, Plus A Modular Approach

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

Elements — a exceptional feature that allows you create custom hooks, page headers, or design templates.
Page Header — allows 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” onto a webpage, each with their own design and column settings.

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

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

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

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

Earlier In 2018, though, the developer added a fresh Website Library attribute for GeneratePress Premium users which allows you easily import any among those 25+ pre-built demonstration websites .

You Can import them right from your WordPress dashboard.

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

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

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

GeneratePress Changes that by giving you a brand new Design meta name 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 altering the sidebar from right to left)
Choose the number of footer widgets to use
Disable certain components, such as your header, navigation menu, article featured image, article title, or footer
Create a special”container” to your page builder

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

By Disabling certain components, you are able to create the proper baseline for your own page builder design, which makes it effortless to create custom articles as needed. Best WordPress Theme For Under Construction

GeneratePress Replies: Affordable And Works On Unlimited Sites

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

That said, If you’re seriously interested in utilizing GeneratePress, I feel you should purchase the GeneratePress Premium plugin, as that is what makes the theme so elastic. The free version doesn’t give you nearly as numerous configurations from the WordPress Customizer. And you will also lose out on the premade Site Library.

GeneratePress Premium is also still quite affordable. It costs just $39.95, and that gives you use on infinite websites . You will also get a 40% discount if you would like to renew to keep on receiving support and upgrades following the initial year (you can, obviously, keep using GeneratePress following the initial year without renewing — you won’t receive any more upgrades ).

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

Conclusion

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

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

But If you’re ready to spend time altering preferences, then GeneratePress’ mode controls give you the flexibility to turn it into any sort of WordPress site. Or, you may even have the ability to find a starter site that fits your needs to save some time.

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

If You combine it with fast-loading hosting, so you shouldn’t have any problem making your site load in under one minute. Best WordPress Theme For Under Construction