Introduction Best WordPress Woocommerce Template

Over the past ten decades, I’ve used a lot of different WordPress themes and have been really disappointed. Up until recently, I had been utilizing MyThemeShop, that was pretty excellent. However, I had to perform a lot of customization to make it do and work the way I wanted it to. A couple weeks ago I decided to give GeneratePress a try, and let me just say, it is undoubtedly the best WordPress theme I’ve found in a decade . I had been blown away and am now moving all of my websites to GeneratePress. I will go into precisely why in my comprehensive GeneratePress review under. And if you are wondering, yes I have attempted Genesis, Astra, OceanWP, Avada, X motif, Divi in addition to several other lightweight and heavier multi-purpose themes. Best WordPress Woocommerce Template

To Get started, Click here to download GeneratePress.

GeneratePress Review

GeneratePress is a totally free WordPress theme created by Tom Usborne, a developer from Canada. I have actually seen it for years in 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 great deal of things on there isn’t that great, or not encouraged for long. However, in this circumstance, that was a mistake. The motif now has over half a million downloads, 80,000+ active installs, with over 500 5-star ratings. 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 purchased the premium version. I could tell right off the bat, the programmer was thinking exactly how I was imagining a theme should get the job done. And I will go into that more below, but let us first look at some of the qualities. I’m going to be covering the premium edition of the subject, since it’s worth very penny. Actually, Tom, if you read this and are seeing Scottsdale, Arizona, coffees on me.

Features

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

Responsive, looks fantastic across all of the devices.

Schema built-in, for better results in SERPs.

Impressive integration using all the WordPress Customizer. I have not been a lover of this customizer in the past, but Tom does it right.

Compatible with 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 want to dive into even more customizations, these really are a great combo. I’ve also read that people using Beaver Builder have had success.

Translation ready.

Font awesome built in.

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

Great active service from the developer. On average, 3 updates per month.

The Documentation can be unbelievable. Besides have good documentation on their website, the subject has existed long enough that everything I Googled during the setup procedure was found inside a few seconds from their forum.

Going Deep Into GeneratePress

Now it’s Time for the fun part! I test a new theme right out of the box with no customizations to see how quickly the base is. This tells me a great deal of what I could expect by the time I add everything to it. Running the inventory GeneratePress WordPress motif 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 is not the situation. You may tell that Tom literally worked hard on ensuring that every record packed in GeneratePress is as small as possible. Together with HTTP/2, the number of documents is not as important. However, the dimensions is! Have a look 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 developer that cares about functionality! And I have Seen exactly the same throughout all of the premium add-ons. They are as small as you can possibly get them. In fact, Font Awesome is most likely the largest file included. And that isn’t even his. With Font Awesome 5 coming around the cornerwe could anticipate this to secure smaller too.

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

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

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 theme. This makes my life much easier. No longer editing my functions.php or header.php files. I will literally upgrade my GeneratePress motif this exact minute rather than shed a single customization. The hooks add-on certainly can help make this possible. It permits you to add custom code/PHP anywhere throughout your WordPress site. Best WordPress Woocommerce Template

Other Things I Love About GeneratePress

On each Page/post you have a lot of alternatives. You are able to change the sidebar design and the footer widgets.

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

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

Responsive Columns

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

Mobile grid thickness

Insert Customized courses

Insert custom inline styles

Equal height columns

This is An example below:

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

To Begin, Click here to download GeneratePress.

Sections Add-on

The Sections add-on in the premium edition of GeneratePress allows you to do all sorts of things in terms of design. Think of it like a page builder with no bloat. GeneratePress is certainly not only for blogs! I am in fact utilizing GeneratePress to our ecommerce site (perfmatters.io) that is operating Easy Digital Downloads. Don’t hesitate to check it out. But as you can see below, it looks nothing like a site.

Speed Tests

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

woorkup.com Old MyThemeShop Theme

My old MyThemeShop theme was pretty fast, but I invested a lot of time customizing it. In reality, 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 was able to achieve faster speeds and 600 fewer lines of code! And keep in mind, I do not have a kid theme. All the customizations were made using the wonderful GP hooks and snippets plugin (both CSS and PHP).

Like the WordPress theme I have running on woorkup? You are in luck. Tom asked if he could create a replica of woorkup to your new GeneratePress site library. I’m happy to let you know that now you can install my woorkup motif in your GeneratePress site with just a single click! It’s known as the Marketer motif. Get started using a fantastic blog design immediately.

brianjackson.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

I also Moved over my personal website, 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. As you can see it already loaded pretty quickly.

brianjackson.io New GeneratePress Theme

I was Able to duplicate the entire look 100 percent in GeneratePress in under one hour. And since you can see it loads even 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 organization site, forgemedia.io, to GeneratePress. Previously I had been using a theme from Array Themes. It’s a fairly basic minimum website, as we just use it to our LLC. As you can see it loaded pretty fast. Best WordPress Woocommerce Template

forgemedia.io New GeneratePress Theme

I was Able to again move everything over and get it looking just how I needed it in under one hour. And since you can see it loads faster! Amazing. I managed to get rid of a total of four plugins and it dropped my whole page burden 2x!

I can not express my Excitement about locating GeneratePress and I am moving over all of my websites for this (which includes some EDD e-commerce websites ). After I have my 9 sites all running in GP without any child themes, my entire life will be a breeze! The developer has restored my faith in multi-purpose themes, which when done the right way, can actually perform quicker.

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

What GeneratePress Is Good For…

GeneratePress Is the perfect alternative for performance-focused users who want 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 great foundation to make it load quickly.

Since Of that, people who assemble WordPress websites for a living love GeneratePress. They’ll typically pair it with a WordPress page builder and use it for literally any type of website.

But GeneratePress Might Not Be A Good Combination If…

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

For Example, if you know you want to produce a style blog, you may be happier choosing a market theme that is developed exclusively for fashion bloggers.

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

So To make GeneratePress look how you would like it to, you will most likely need to go in and customize matters. And though the significant benefit of GeneratePress is how customizable it is, many users, particularly casual users, do not like having to make those changes themselves.

GeneratePress Features That Make It Unique

Here Are a few of the particular characteristics that clarify why GeneratePress is so common.

Lots Of Customization Options In The Real-Time WordPress Customizer

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

GeneratePress Utilizes the WordPress Customizer for customization, and this is convenient as you’ll have the ability to see all of the changes that you create in real time.

The Free variant of GeneratePress provides you adequate options, but if you own GeneratePress Premium, you will be able to customize pretty much all about your site.

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

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

Likewise, That the Typography area enables you to control the font for every single element on your website, including buttons:

And You also get a thorough region to control the color of each and every element on your website.

All In all, GeneratePress will give you a lot more customization options in the WordPress Customizer than most other topics. This level of detail may be a bit overwhelming if you’re a beginner. But as soon as you understand how the settings come together, you will have full control over how your site appears.

Optimized Performance And Quick Page Load Times

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

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

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

First, I put up a vacant website utilizing a random popular WordPress.org theme (Envo Magazine). After analyzing its functionality 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 in any way! But GeneratePress can perform.

Next, I triggered GeneratePress on the same test website without changing anything else. Here is how GeneratePress did:

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 asks, ~40% less

If You do that same test with other themes, you are going to continue to find that GeneratePress is among those fastest-loading WordPress themes in existence. Best WordPress Woocommerce Template

Other Useful Premium Extensions, Plus A Modular Approach

Past 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 customized hooks, page headers, or layout templates.
Page Header — lets you create a exceptional page header onto a per-page basis.
Sections — that is sort of like lightweight page building. It permits you to create different”sections” on a webpage, each with their own layout and column preferences.

To Remain lightweight, GeneratePress also provides you a modular port where you could pick and choose what features you would like to activate.

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

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

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

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

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

With Most themes, each page and post will use the very same settings for the most part. You may have some custom templates or formats — but you do not have very much control beyond that.

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

You Can utilize this meta box to:

Change the number of sidebars your site uses, or the sidebar orientation (such as changing the sidebar from right to left)
Choose the number of footer widgets to utilize
Disable certain components, like your header, navigation menu, post featured image, post title, or footer
Produce a special”container” to your own page builder

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

By Disabling certain components, you’re in a position to produce the correct baseline for your page builder layout, making it effortless to create custom articles as needed. Best WordPress Woocommerce Template

GeneratePress Pricing: Cheap And Works On Unlimited Sites

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

That said, If you are serious about utilizing GeneratePress, I believe you should purchase the GeneratePress Premium plugin, as that’s what produces the theme so elastic. The free version does not give you nearly as many settings from the WordPress Customizer. And you’ll also miss out on the premade Site Library.

GeneratePress Premium is also still fairly affordable. It costs only $39.95, and that provides you use on infinite sites. You will also get a 40% discount if you would like to renew to continue receiving support and upgrades following the first year (you can, obviously, keep using GeneratePress following the first year without beating — you just won’t get any more upgrades ).

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

Wrap-up

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

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

But If you are ready to spend some time changing preferences, then GeneratePress’ mode controls give you the flexibility to flip it into any sort of WordPress site. Or, you may even have the ability to locate a starter website that fulfills your needs to save some time.

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

If You blend it with fast-loading hosting, so you should have no difficulty making your website load in under one minute. Best WordPress Woocommerce Template