Intro Best WordPress Themes Minimalist

Within the past ten years, I’ve used a lot of different WordPress topics and have been really disappointed. Up till recently, I was using MyThemeShop, that was fairly good. But I still had to do a great deal of customization to allow it to do and work how I wanted it to. A couple of 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 was dismissed and am now moving all my sites to GeneratePress. I will enter exactly why in my in-depth GeneratePress review below. And if you’re wondering, yes I have attempted Genesis, Astra, OceanWP, Avada, X motif, Divi in addition to many other lightweight and heavier multicolored themes. Best WordPress Themes Minimalist

To Get started, Click here to download GeneratePress.

GeneratePress Review

GeneratePress is a free WordPress theme made by Tom Usborne, a programmer from Canada. I have actually seen it for years in the WordPress repository. Most of you know that I’m fairly picky when it comes to web performance, so I tend to dismiss everything in the repository. Typically because a lot of things on there is not that great, or not supported for long. However, in this case, this was a mistake. The motif currently has more than half a million downloads, 80,000+ active matches, with over 500 5-star ratings. So obviously Tom is doing something right here.

I Really set up the free version of the theme and in a matter of 15 minutes purchased the superior version. I could tell right off the bat, the developer was thinking exactly how I was imagining a theme should get the job done. And I’ll go into that more below, but let us first look at a number of the qualities. I will be covering the superior version of the subject, since it’s worth . Actually, Tom, in the event that you read this and are visiting Scottsdale, Arizona, coffees on me.

Characteristics

Super lightweight and fast. Modular design allowing you to enable/disable things you don’t 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 with the WordPress Customizer. I haven’t been a fan of the customizer in the past, but Tom does it correctly.

Compatible with all popular plugins, Yoast SEO, WooCommerce, EDD, BuddyPress, bbPress, and WPML. Fantastic 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 great combo. I have also read that people using Beaver Builder have experienced success.

Translation ready.

Font wonderful built in.

Tons of filters and hooks which make it good for developers.

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 been around long enough that everything I Googled during the setup process was found inside a few seconds in their own forum.

Going Deep Into GeneratePress

Now it’s Time for the fun part! I test a brand new theme right out of the box without any customizations to see how fast the foundation is. This tells me a lot of what I could expect by the time I add everything to it. Running the stock GeneratePress WordPress theme 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 layout was going to generate a whole lot of big files, but this is not the case. You can tell that Tom literally worked hard on making sure every file packed 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 performance! And I have Seen exactly the same throughout each of the premium add-ons. They’re as small as you can possibly get them. In reality, Font Awesome is probably the largest file contained. And that isn’t even his. Together with Font Awesome 5 coming round the cornerwe can anticipate this to get smaller too.

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

If You are curious, I’m using the next 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 easier. No more editing my functions.php or header.php documents. I will literally update my GeneratePress theme this very minute rather than shed a single customization. The hooks add-on definitely helps make this possible. It permits you to incorporate custom code/PHP anywhere throughout your WordPress website. Best WordPress Themes Minimalist

Other Things I Love About GeneratePress

On each Page/post that you have a lot of options. You are able to change 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 components.

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

Responsive Columns

Another Plugin I highly recommend grabbing is the free Lightweight Grid Columns. Not to my surprise, this can be 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 width

Tablet grid thickness

Mobile grid width

Insert Customized classes

Insert custom inline styles

Equal height columns

This is An example below:

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

To Begin, Click here to download GeneratePress.

Sections Add-on

The Segments add-in in the premium edition of GeneratePress lets you perform all kinds of things in terms of design. Think of it like a webpage builder without the bloat. GeneratePress is certainly not just for blogs! I’m in reality 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 nothing like a blog.

Speed Tests

For all those Of you who are regular readers, you probably did not even notice that I changed the entire theme that forces 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 old MyThemeShop theme was pretty quickly, but I invested a great deal of time scrutinizing it. In fact, I’ve gotten a great deal of emails from you guys asking me to print all my customizations. My advice today is, just get GeneratePress!

woorkup.com New GeneratePress Theme

With the New GeneratePress theme I was able to attain faster speeds and 600 fewer lines of code! And keep in mind, I don’t have a child theme. All the customizations were made using the awesome GP hooks and snippets plugin (both CSS and PHP).

Like the WordPress theme I have working on woorkup? You’re in luck. Tom asked if he could create a replica of woorkup to your brand new GeneratePress blog library. I am pleased to let you know that you can now put in my woorkup theme in your own GeneratePress site with only a single click! It’s known as the Marketer theme. Get started using a fantastic blog design immediately.

brianjackson.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

Additionally, I Moved over my personal site, brianjackson.io, to GeneratePress. Previously I had been using a theme from Array Themes. It is a fairly basic minimum website, since I do not use it to get much. Since you can see it already loaded pretty fast.

brianjackson.io New GeneratePress Theme

I had been Able to replicate the entire look 100 percent in GeneratePress in under an 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’s a fairly basic minimum website, as we just use it for our LLC. Since you can see it already loaded pretty fast. Best WordPress Themes Minimalist

forgemedia.io New GeneratePress Theme

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

I can not express my Excitement about locating GeneratePress and I’m moving over all of my websites for this (which includes several EDD e-commerce websites ). Once I have my 9 sites all running in GP with no child topics, my entire life will be a breeze! The developer has revived my faith in multi-purpose themes, which when done the right way, can actually perform faster.

And The best thing is, I now have a billion more choices to choose from than I did earlier.

What GeneratePress Is Great For…

GeneratePress Is the ideal option 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 because GeneratePress has a focus on functionality, the website that you build will have a great foundation to make it load fast.

Since 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 site.

But GeneratePress Might Not Be A Good Fit If…

…you Want something which will instantly appear perfect from the box.

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

While GeneratePress has gotten a great deal simpler to use, thanks to its pre-built Site Library, GeneratePress still seems very barebones if you first install it.

So To make GeneratePress look how you want it to, you’ll almost certainly 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 some of the particular characteristics that clarify why GeneratePress is indeed popular.

Plenty Of Customization Options From The Real-Time WordPress Customizer

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

GeneratePress Uses the WordPress Customizer for customization, and this is convenient as you will have the ability to see all the changes that you make in real time.

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

For Example, if you go in the Layout area, you may configure comprehensive settings for your:

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

Likewise, The Typography area enables you to control the font to get every single element on your site, such as buttons:

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

All In all, GeneratePress will provide you much more customization options in the WordPress Customizer compared to most other themes. This amount of detail may be a little overwhelming if you are a newcomer. But as soon as you understand how the settings come together, you will have full control on how your site appears.

Optimized Performance And Quick Page Load Times

Around All its attributes, GeneratePress always includes a focus on exceptional performance and tidy code. The whole 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 some badly coded themes can even exceed 1 MB!

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

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

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

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

That is Not bad at all! However, GeneratePress can do better.

Next, I triggered GeneratePress on the same test site without changing anything else. Here’s how GeneratePress failed:

Had a performance tier 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 do that same test with other topics, you are going to continue to see that GeneratePress is one of the fastest-loading WordPress themes in existence. Best WordPress Themes Minimalist

Other Helpful Premium Extensions, Plus Much Modular Approach

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

Elements — a exceptional feature that lets you create customized hooks, page headers, or design templates.
Page Header — allows you create a unique page header onto a per-page basis.
Sections — that is kind of like lightweight page construction. It lets you create separate”sections” on a webpage, each with their own layout 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 need to slow your site down for a quality that you’ll never use.

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

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

Earlier In 2018, however, the programmer added a new Website Library feature for GeneratePress Premium users that lets you easily import any one of those 25+ pre-built demonstration websites .

You Can import them right from your WordPress dashboard.

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

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

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

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

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 how many footer widgets to use
Disable certain components, such as your header, navigation menu, article featured picture, post title, or footer
Create a special”container” to your own page builder

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

By Disabling certain elements, you’re able to produce the proper baseline for your own page builder layout, making it easy to create custom articles as needed. Best WordPress Themes Minimalist

GeneratePress Pricing: Affordable And Works On Unlimited Sites

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

That said, If you are seriously interested in utilizing GeneratePress, I feel you should buy the GeneratePress Premium plugin, as that’s what produces the theme so elastic. The free version does not give you almost as many settings in the WordPress Customizer. And you’ll also miss out on the premade Site Library.

GeneratePress Premium can be still fairly reasonably priced. It costs only $39.95, and that provides 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 first year (you can, of course, continue using GeneratePress after the initial year without beating — you just won’t receive any more updates).

When You believe the normal premium WordPress theme will usually cost around $60, GeneratePress offers a great price.

Conclusion

As I mentioned, I do not think GeneratePress is for everybody.

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

But If you’re willing to spend some time changing preferences, then GeneratePress’ mode controls give you the flexibility to flip it into any type of WordPress website. Or, you may even be able to find a starter site that fulfills your needs to save a little time.

Additionally, It is among the fastest-loading WordPress topics that you will find. So if you’re looking for 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 site load in under one minute. Best WordPress Themes Minimalist