Background Best WordPress Themes Real Estate

Over the previous 10 decades, I’ve used a lot of different WordPress themes and have been really disappointed. Up until recently, I was utilizing MyThemeShop, which was fairly excellent. However, I still had to perform a lot of customization to make it do and operate how I needed it to. A few weeks ago I decided to give GeneratePress a try, and let me just say, it is undoubtedly the finest WordPress theme I’ve discovered in 10 years. I was dismissed and am now moving all my sites to GeneratePress. I’ll go into precisely why in my comprehensive 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 multicolored themes. Best WordPress Themes Real Estate

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’ve really seen it for years from the WordPress repository. Most of you realize that I’m pretty picky when it comes to web performance, and so I have a tendency to dismiss everything from the repository. Typically because a lot of things on there isn’t that good, or not encouraged for long. Nonetheless, in this case, this was a mistake. The motif currently has more than half a million downloads, 80,000+ busy installs, with over 500 5-star ratings. So clearly Tom is doing some thing 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 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 premium edition of the subject, since it’s worth very penny. In fact, Tom, if you read this and are visiting Scottsdale, Arizona, java on me.

Characteristics

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

Responsive, looks great across all of the devices.

Schema built-in, for greater outcomes in SERPs.

Dramatic integration using all the WordPress Customizer. I haven’t been a lover of the customizer previously, but Tom does it right.

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

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

Translation ready.

Font wonderful built in.

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

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

The Documentation is also incredible. Besides have great documentation on their website, the subject has been around long enough that everything I Googled throughout the setup process was found within a couple of seconds in their own forum.

Diving Into GeneratePress

Now it is Time to the fun part! I test a brand 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 could 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 load time. I was very impressed.

One Thing I was worried about with GeneratePress was that the modular layout was going to produce a whole lot of big files, but that is not the situation. You can tell that Tom literally worked hard on making sure every record packed in GeneratePress is as small as possible. Together with HTTP/2, the number of documents is not as significant. However, the size is! Take 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

That is a programmer that cares about functionality! And I’ve Seen the same throughout each of the premium add-ons. They’re literally as small as you can possibly get them. In reality, Font Awesome is probably the largest file included. And that isn’t even his. With Font Awesome 5 coming around the corner, we could expect that to get smaller also.

The premium add-ons Are installation in what I’d call a modular design. It is possible to activate/deactivate anything you aren’t using to ensure they do not load on your website. As the co-developer of this perfmatters plugin that has a script manager built, I felt at home for this. Everything ought to be made 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 characteristics of GeneratePress is I no longer have to use a young child motif . This makes my life much simpler. No longer editing my functions.php or header.php files. I can literally update my GeneratePress theme this very minute and not shed one customization. The hooks add-on definitely helps make this possible. It allows you to add custom code/PHP everywhere throughout your WordPress site. Best WordPress Themes Real Estate

Other Things I Love About GeneratePress

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

You Can quickly swap a page involving the default option to a full width page, in addition to disable components.

The WordPress customizer choices is really where GeneratePress really shines! Bear in mind, a lot of these options are permitted by the premium add-ons. I can’t show you everything, otherwise, we would be here all day. However, let me show you couple 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 made by precisely the exact same programmer as GeneratePress. It allows you a super simple way to incorporate responsive columns into any page or post. Characteristics include:

Desktop grid width

Tablet grid width

Mobile grid thickness

Insert Customized courses

Insert custom inline styles

Equal height columns

Here is An example below:

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

To Begin, Click here to download GeneratePress.

Sections Add-on

The Sections add-on in the premium version of GeneratePress lets you do all kinds of things concerning design. Consider it like a page builder without the bloat. GeneratePress is certainly not only for blogs! I am in reality utilizing GeneratePress to our ecommerce website (perfmatters.io) which is running Easy Digital Downloads. Feel free to check it out. But as you can see below, it looks like a site.

Speed Tests

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

woorkup.com Old MyThemeShop Theme

My old MyThemeShop theme was pretty fast, but I spent a lot of time scrutinizing it. In fact, I have gotten a great deal of emails from you guys asking me to publish all of my customizations. My advice today 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. All the customizations were made with the awesome GP hooks and snippets plugin (both CSS and PHP).

Like the WordPress theme I’ve working on woorkup? You’re in luck. Tom asked if he can make a copy of woorkup to your new GeneratePress blog library. I’m pleased to allow you to know that you can now install my woorkup theme in your own GeneratePress website with only a click! It is known as the Marketer motif. Get started using a fantastic blog layout immediately.

brianjackson.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

Additionally, I Moved within my personal site, brianjackson.io, to GeneratePress. Previously I was using a motif from Array Themes. It is a fairly basic minimal site, since I don’t use it to get much. As you can see it loaded pretty fast.

brianjackson.io New GeneratePress Theme

I was Able to duplicate the whole appearance 100% in GeneratePress in under one hour. And since you can view it loads faster! Amazing. I was even able to get rid of a couple plugins which weren’t needed because of GP.

forgemedia.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

Additionally, I Moved over our business website, forgemedia.io, to GeneratePress. Previously I had been using a motif from Array Themes. It’s a pretty basic minimal site, as we simply use it for our LLC. As you can see it already loaded pretty quickly. Best WordPress Themes Real Estate

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 since you can see it loads faster! Amazing. I was able to get rid of 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 my sites for this (which includes some EDD e-commerce sites). Once I have my 9 sites all running in GP without any child themes, my life is going to be a breeze! The programmer has revived my faith in multi-purpose subjects , which when done the right way, can actually perform quicker.

And The best news isI now have a thousand more choices to choose 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 customize 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 foundation to make it load fast.

Because Of that, people 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 website.

However GeneratePress Might Not Be A Fantastic Combination If…

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

For Example, if you know you wish to create a fashion blog, you might be happier choosing a market theme that is developed exclusively for trend bloggers.

Even though GeneratePress is becoming a lot 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’ll most likely will need to go in and customize matters. And though the substantial benefit of GeneratePress is how customizable it is, some users, particularly casual users, don’t like having to make those changes themselves.

GeneratePress Features That Make It Unique

Here Are a few of the specific features that clarify why GeneratePress is so common.

Plenty Of Customization Options From The Real-Time WordPress Customizer

Beyond Performance, another area where GeneratePress does well is its customization options.

GeneratePress Utilizes 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 gives you decent possibilities, but if you have GeneratePress Premium, you’ll be able to customize nearly everything about your site.

For Example, if you go in the Layout region, you can configure comprehensive settings for yourown:

Header — you can move your header round and change its 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 — such as featured image dimensions, metadata, etc..
Footer layout — just like how many widgets to add

Likewise, The Typography place lets you control the font for every single element on your site, such as buttons:

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

All In all, GeneratePress will give you much more customization options in the WordPress Customizer compared to most other themes. This level of detail may be a bit overwhelming if you are a beginner. But once you understand how the preferences come together, you will have full control over how your site looks.

Optimized Performance And Quick Page Load Times

Across All of its features, GeneratePress consistently has a focus on exceptional performance and clean code. The entire theme is less than 30 kB, which is 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 some badly coded themes can even surpass 1 MB!

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

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

First, I set up an empty site using a random popular WordPress.org motif (Envo Magazine). After testing its performance with Pingdom, it:

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

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

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

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

If You do the exact same test with different themes, you’ll continue to find that GeneratePress is one of the fastest-loading WordPress themes in life. Best WordPress Themes Real Estate

Other Useful Premium Extensions, Plus A Modular Approach

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

Elements — a exceptional 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 building. It permits you to create separate”sections” on a page, each with their own design and column settings.

To Stay lightweight, GeneratePress also gives you a modular interface where you could pick and choose exactly which features you would like to trigger.

That Way, you do not need to slow your site down 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 construct GeneratePress sites from a blank canvas no matter what, which made the motif difficult for casual users to install.

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

You Can import them right from the 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 Detailed Control Over Every Bit Of Content

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

GeneratePress Changes that by providing you a brand new Layout meta name 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 (like changing the sidebar from right to left)
Choose the number of footer widgets to use
Disable certain elements, such as your header, navigation menu, article featured image, post title, or footer
Produce a special”container” for your own page builder

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

By Disabling certain components, you are in a position to create the correct baseline for your own page builder layout, making it easy to create custom content as needed. Best WordPress Themes Real Estate

GeneratePress Pricing: Cheap And Works On Unlimited Sites

The Core GeneratePress theme can be obtained for free at WordPress.org.

That said, If you are serious about using GeneratePress, I believe you need to purchase the GeneratePress Premium plugin, as that is what makes the theme so flexible. The free version does not give you nearly as numerous settings from the WordPress Customizer. And you’ll also miss out on the premade Site Library.

GeneratePress Premium can be still quite reasonably priced. It costs only $39.95, and that gives you use on unlimited sites. You’ll also get a 40% discount if you want to renew to continue receiving support and updates after the initial year (you can, obviously, keep using GeneratePress following the first year without beating — you won’t get any more updates).

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

Wrap-up

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

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

However, If you are willing to spend some time changing settings, GeneratePress’ mode controls give you the flexibility to turn it into any type of WordPress site. Or, you might even have the ability to locate a starter website that fulfills your needs to save a little time.

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

If You combine it with fast-loading hosting, you shouldn’t have any difficulty making your website load in under one minute. Best WordPress Themes Real Estate