Intro Best WordPress Themes With Blog

Within the past ten years, I have used a great deal of different WordPress topics and have been really disappointed. Up till recently, I had been using MyThemeShop, that was pretty excellent. However, I had to perform a lot of customization to make it do and work how I wanted it to. A few of weeks ago I decided to provide GeneratePress a try, and let me just say, it is by far the best WordPress theme I have discovered in a decade . I was blown away and am now moving all my sites to GeneratePress. I will enter precisely why in my comprehensive GeneratePress review below. And if you are wondering, yes I have tried Genesis, Astra, OceanWP, Avada, X motif, Divi in addition to many other lightweight and heavier multi-purpose themes. Best WordPress Themes With Blog

To Get started, Click here to download GeneratePress.

GeneratePress Evaluation

GeneratePress is a free WordPress theme created by Tom Usborne, a programmer from Canada. I have really seen it for years from the WordPress repository. Most of you know that I am fairly picky when it comes to web performance, and so I have a tendency to dismiss everything from the repository. Typically because a great deal of stuff on there isn’t that good, or not encouraged for long. However, in this circumstance, that was a mistake. The motif currently has more than half a million downloads, 80,000+ busy matches, with over 500 5-star ratings. So clearly Tom is doing some thing right here.

I Really set up the free version of the motif and in a matter of 15 minutes bought the superior version. I could tell right off the bat, the developer was thinking precisely how I was envisioning a theme should get the job done. 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 theme, because it’s worth very penny. In fact, Tom, if you read this and so are visiting Scottsdale, Arizona, java on me.

Characteristics

Super lightweight and quick. 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 devices.

Schema built-in, for better results in SERPs.

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

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

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

Resumes prepared.

Font wonderful built-in.

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

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

The Documentation can be incredible. Besides have great documentation on their site, the theme 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 for the fun part! I test a brand new theme right from the box with no customizations to see how quickly the foundation is. This tells me a lot of what I could expect by the time I add everything for this. Running the inventory GeneratePress WordPress theme on Kinsta hosting clocked in at a whopping 265 ms load time. I was quite impressed.

One Thing I was worried about with GeneratePress was that the modular layout was going to produce a lot of big files, but that isn’t the situation. You can tell that Tom actually worked hard on making sure that every file packed in GeneratePress is as small as possible. With HTTP/2, the amount of files isn’t as important. However, the size is! Have a peek 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

This is a programmer that cares about functionality! And I’ve Seen the same during all of the premium add-ons. They’re as small as possible get them. In fact, Font Awesome is most likely the biggest file contained. And that isn’t even his. With Font Awesome 5 coming round the corner, we could anticipate this to get smaller also.

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

If You’re 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 that I no more have to use a young child theme. This makes my life much easier. No longer editing my functions.php or header.php documents. I will literally update my GeneratePress motif this very minute rather than shed one customization. The hooks add-on definitely helps make it possible. It allows you to incorporate custom code/PHP everywhere throughout your WordPress site. Best WordPress Themes With Blog

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 easily swap a page involving the default option to a full width page, as well as disable elements.

The WordPress customizer choices is where GeneratePress really shines! Remember, a lot of these options are enabled by the superior add-ons. I can not show you everything, otherwise, we would be here all day. But let me show you few which actually come in handy.

Responsive Columns

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

Desktop grid thickness

Tablet grid thickness

Mobile grid thickness

Add Customized classes

Insert custom inline designs

Equal height columns

Here is An example under:

You May Want to Also catch his amazing WP Show Posts plugin too. See my featured articles on the sidebar of this website? That’s using the WP Display Posts plugin. I have it set to display 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 great.

To Begin, Click here to download GeneratePress.

Sections Add-on

The Segments add-in in the premium edition of GeneratePress allows you to perform all sorts of things concerning design. Consider it like a webpage builder with no bloat. GeneratePress is certainly not just for blogs! I’m in reality utilizing GeneratePress for our ecommerce website (perfmatters.io) which is running 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 likely didn’t even notice that I changed the entire motif that powers woorkup.com. It only took me about an hour to get GeneratePress to mimic my MyThemeShop motif which I had spent annually customizing. Here’s a comparison below.

woorkup.com Old MyThemeShop Theme

My older MyThemeShop motif was pretty quickly, but I spent 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 of my customizations. My advice today is, just get GeneratePress!

woorkup.com New GeneratePress Theme

Together with the New GeneratePress theme I managed to attain faster speeds and 600 fewer lines of code! And keep in mind, I don’t have a kid theme. Each of the customizations were created 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 can create a copy of woorkup to your new GeneratePress blog library. I am pleased to let you know that now you can put in my woorkup theme in your GeneratePress site with just a single click! It is called the Marketer motif. Get started with a great blog design instantly.

brianjackson.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

I also Moved within my personal site, brianjackson.io, to GeneratePress. Previously I was using a motif from Array Themes. It’s a pretty basic minimum website, since I do not use it to get much. Since you can see it 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 as you can view it loads faster! Amazing. I was able to get rid of a couple plugins which 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 had been using a motif from Array Themes. It is a fairly basic minimum site, as we simply use it to our LLC. As you can see it already loaded pretty quickly. Best WordPress Themes With Blog

forgemedia.io New GeneratePress Theme

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

I can’t express my Excitement about locating GeneratePress and I am moving over all my websites for this (which includes some EDD e-commerce websites ). Once I’ve got my 9 websites all running in GP without any child themes, my life will be a breeze! The programmer has restored my faith in multi-purpose themes, which when done the correct way, can actually perform quicker.

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

What GeneratePress Is Good For…

GeneratePress Is the ideal option for performance-focused users that wish to be able to customize and control precisely how their site appears.

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

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

But GeneratePress Might Not Be A Good Combination If…

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

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

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

So To create GeneratePress look how you would like it to, you will most likely need to go in and personalize things. And while 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 specific characteristics that explain why GeneratePress is so popular.

Plenty Of Customization Options From The Real-Time WordPress Customizer

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

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

The Free version of GeneratePress provides you decent possibilities, but should you have GeneratePress Premium, you will have the ability to customize pretty much everything about your website.

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

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

Similarly, The Typography area enables you to control the font to get every single element on your site, including buttons:

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

All Whatsoever, GeneratePress will provide you a lot more customization options in the WordPress Customizer than most other themes. This amount of detail may be a little overwhelming if you are a newcomer. But once you understand the way the settings come together, you’ll have full control over how your site appears.

Optimized Performance And Fast Page Load Times

Across All its features, GeneratePress always has a focus on exceptional performance and tidy code. The whole motif is less than 30 kB, which is about as small as you’ll ever find for a WordPress theme. Even most other optimized WordPress topics are still 200+ kB. And a few badly coded themes can even exceed 1 MB!

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

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

First, I put up an empty website using a haphazard popular WordPress.org motif (Envo Magazine). After testing 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 requests

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

Next, I triggered GeneratePress on exactly the exact same test site without altering anything else. Here’s 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 requests, ~40% fewer

If You do that same test with different topics, you’ll continue to see that GeneratePress is among the fastest-loading WordPress topics in existence. Best WordPress Themes With Blog

Other Helpful Premium Extensions, Plus A Modular Approach

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

Elements — a unique feature which allows you create customized hooks, page headers, or design templates.
Page Header — lets you create a unique page header on a per-page basis.
Sections — that is kind of like lightweight page construction. It permits you to create separate”sections” onto a page, each with their own design and column preferences.

To Remain lightweight, GeneratePress also provides you a modular port where you could pick and choose exactly which characteristics you would like to trigger.

That Way, you do not need to slow down your site for a feature that you’ll never 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 no matter what, which left the theme difficult for casual users to install.

Earlier In 2018, though, the programmer added a fresh Website Library attribute for GeneratePress Premium users that lets 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 a few buttons to import a demo site.

Page-Level Settings Give 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 don’t have very much control past that.

GeneratePress Changes that by giving you a new Design meta name box for every single page and post:

You Can utilize this meta box to:

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

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

By Disabling certain components, you are able to create the correct baseline for your page builder layout, which makes it effortless to create custom content as needed. Best WordPress Themes With Blog

GeneratePress Pricing: Cheap And Works On Unlimited Sites

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

Nevertheless, If you are serious about utilizing GeneratePress, I believe you need to buy the GeneratePress Premium plugin, as that’s what produces the theme so elastic. The free version doesn’t give you nearly as numerous settings in the WordPress Customizer. And you will also lose out on the premade Site Library.

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

However, If you’re ready to spend some time altering settings, GeneratePress’ mode controls give you the flexibility to flip it into any type of WordPress website. Or, you might even be able to find a starter site that fulfills your needs to save a little time.

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

If You combine it with fast-loading hosting, you shouldn’t have any problem making your site load in under one second. Best WordPress Themes With Blog