Introduction Easy To Use WordPress Themes Free

Over the past 10 decades, I have used a lot of different WordPress topics and have been really disappointed. Up until recently, I was utilizing MyThemeShop, that was fairly excellent. But I still had to perform a great deal of customization to make it perform and work how I wanted it to. A couple weeks ago I decided to give GeneratePress a try, and let me just say, it’s undoubtedly the finest WordPress theme I’ve discovered in 10 years. I was blown away and am now moving all my websites to GeneratePress. I’ll go into precisely why in my in-depth GeneratePress review below. And if you are wondering, yes I have attempted Genesis, Astra, OceanWP, Avada, X motif, Divi in addition to several other lightweight and thicker multicolored themes. Easy To Use WordPress Themes Free

To Begin, Click here to download GeneratePress.

GeneratePress Evaluation

GeneratePress is a totally free WordPress theme created by Tom Usborne, a developer from Canada. I have actually seen it for many years in the WordPress repository. Most of you know that I am pretty picky when it comes to web performance, and so I have a tendency to ignore everything from the repository. Typically because a lot of things on there is not that good, or not supported for long. However, in this circumstance, that was a mistake. The theme now has more than half a million downloads, 80,000+ active installs, with over 500 5-star ratings. So obviously Tom is doing some thing right here.

I Really installed the free version of the theme and in a matter of 15 minutes bought the premium 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 some of the features. I will be covering the superior edition of the theme, because it’s worth . Actually, Tom, in the event that you read this and so are visiting Scottsdale, Arizona, coffees on me.

Characteristics

Super lightweight and fast. Modular design allowing you to enable/disable items you do not need running. This is only one of the biggest reasons I adore GeneratePress.

Responsive, looks great across all of the devices.

Schema built-in, for better outcomes in SERPs.

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

Compatible with all popular plugins, Yoast SEO, WooCommerce, EDD, BuddyPress, bbPress, and WPML. Great 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 are a terrific combo. I’ve also read that people using Beaver Builder have had success.

Resumes prepared.

Font awesome built in.

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

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

The Documentation is also unbelievable. Besides have great documentation on their site, the subject has existed long enough that what I Googled throughout the setup procedure was found within a couple of seconds from their forum.

Diving Into GeneratePress

Now it’s Time to the fun part! I always test a new theme right out of the box with no customizations to see how fast the foundation is. This tells me a great deal 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 design was going to produce a whole lot of big files, but that isn’t the case. You may tell that Tom literally worked hard on ensuring every file loaded in GeneratePress is as small as possible. With HTTP/2, the number of documents is not as important. However, the size is! Take 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

That is a programmer that cares about functionality! And I’ve Seen the same during each of the premium add-ons. They are literally as small as you can possibly get them. In fact, Font Awesome is most likely the biggest file included. And that is not even his. With Font Awesome 5 coming round the corner, we could expect that to secure smaller too.

The premium add-ons Are setup in what I’d call a modular design. You can activate/deactivate whatever 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 for this. Everything should be made this way.

If You’re 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 that I no more need to use a Child theme. This makes my life so much simpler. No longer editing my functions.php or header.php documents. I will literally upgrade my GeneratePress theme this very moment rather than shed a single customization. The hooks add-on certainly helps make it possible. It permits you to add custom code/PHP everywhere throughout your WordPress site. Easy To Use WordPress Themes Free

Other Things I Love About GeneratePress

On every Page/post you have a lot of options. You are able to change the sidebar design 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 options is really where GeneratePress really shines! Remember, lots of these choices are enabled by the superior add-ons. I can not show you everything, otherwise, we’d be here all day. However, let me show you couple which actually come in handy.

Responsive Columns

Another Plugin I highly recommend grabbing is your free Lightweight Grid Columns. Not to my surprise, this can be created by precisely the same developer as GeneratePress. It enables you a super easy way to add responsive columns into any page or post. Characteristics include:

Desktop grid thickness

Tablet grid thickness

Mobile grid width

Insert Customized classes

Insert custom inline styles

Equal height columns

This is An example under:

You might want to Also catch his incredible WP Display Posts plugin also. View 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 might also have it show past modified/updated posts, recent articles, etc.. I am using the free version and it works terrific.

To Get started, 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 concerning design. Consider it like a webpage builder with no bloat. GeneratePress is certainly not just for blogs! I’m in reality utilizing GeneratePress to our ecommerce site (perfmatters.io) which is running 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 those who are regular readers, you likely didn’t even notice that I changed the whole motif that forces woorkup.com. It only took me about an hour to get GeneratePress to mimic my MyThemeShop motif that I had spent annually customizing. Here’s a comparison below.

woorkup.com Old MyThemeShop Theme

My older MyThemeShop theme was pretty quickly, but I invested a lot of time customizing it. In fact, I’ve gotten a lot of emails from you guys asking me to print all my customizations. My advice now is, simply 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 do not have a child theme. Each of the customizations were created with 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 make a copy of woorkup for the new GeneratePress blog library. I am happy to let you know that you can now put in my woorkup theme in your GeneratePress website with only a single click! It is called the Marketer motif. Get started with a fantastic blog design instantly.

brianjackson.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

I also Moved over my personal website, brianjackson.io, to GeneratePress. Previously I had been using a motif from Array Themes. It’s a fairly basic minimum website, since I don’t use it for much. Since you can see it already loaded pretty quickly.

brianjackson.io New GeneratePress Theme

I was Able to replicate the entire appearance 100 percent in GeneratePress in under an 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 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 motif from Array Themes. It’s a pretty basic minimal website, as we simply use it for our LLC. Since you can see it loaded pretty quickly. Easy To Use WordPress Themes Free

forgemedia.io New GeneratePress Theme

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

I can not express my Excitement about finding GeneratePress and I’m moving over all of my websites for this (which comprises some EDD e-commerce websites ). After I have my 9 sites all running in GP without any child topics, my entire life is going to 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 now have a billion more options to pick from than I did earlier.

What GeneratePress Is Good For…

GeneratePress Is the ideal alternative for performance-focused users who want to have the ability 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 foundation to make it load quickly.

Since Of that, those who assemble WordPress websites for a living love GeneratePress. They will normally pair it with a WordPress site builder and use it for literally any type of website.

But GeneratePress Might Not Be A Good Combination If…

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

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

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

So To create GeneratePress look how you want it to, you will most likely need to go in and personalize matters. And while the significant benefit of GeneratePress is how customizable it is, some users, especially casual users, do not like having to make those changes .

GeneratePress Features That Make It Unique

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

Lots Of Customization Options From The Real-Time WordPress Customizer

Past Performance, another place where GeneratePress does well is its customization options.

GeneratePress Uses the WordPress Customizer for customization, which can be convenient because you will have the ability to see all the changes that you create in real time.

The Free variant of GeneratePress gives you decent possibilities, but if you have GeneratePress Premium, you’ll have the ability to customize nearly all about your website.

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

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

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

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

All In all, GeneratePress will provide you much more customization choices from the WordPress Customizer compared to most other themes. This amount of detail may be a bit overwhelming if you are a beginner. But as soon as you realize the way the settings come together, you’ll have full control on how your website appears.

Optimized Performance And Quick 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, and it is about as little as you are ever going to find for a WordPress theme. Even most other optimized WordPress topics are still 200+ kB. And some poorly coded themes can even exceed 1 MB!

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

Place That collectively, and you obtain a superfast-loading motif. How fast? To give you a sense, I conducted a little test.

First, I put up an empty website utilizing a random popular WordPress.org motif (Envo Magazine). After analyzing its functionality with Pingdom, it

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

That’s Not bad in any way! However, GeneratePress can perform.

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

Had a performance tier of 87, 10 points better
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 different themes, you are going to continue to see that GeneratePress is among those fastest-loading WordPress topics in existence. Easy To Use WordPress Themes Free

Other Helpful Premium Extensions, Plus A Modular Approach

Beyond Giving you more design controls in the WordPress Customizer, GeneratePress Premium comes with a lot of other useful features such as:

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

To Stay lightweight, GeneratePress also provides you a modular interface where you can select and choose what characteristics you would like to trigger.

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

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

In The last, you needed to construct GeneratePress sites from a blank canvas no matter what, which made the theme difficult for casual users to set up.

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

You Can import them directly 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 Provide You Detailed Control Over Every Piece Of Content

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

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

You Can utilize this meta box to:

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

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

By Disabling certain components, you are in a position to create the proper baseline for your page builder design, which makes it easy to create custom content as needed. Easy To Use WordPress Themes Free

GeneratePress Pricing: Affordable And Works On Unlimited Sites

The Heart GeneratePress theme can be obtained at no cost at WordPress.org.

That said, If you are serious about utilizing GeneratePress, I feel you need to buy the GeneratePress Premium plugin, as that is what makes the theme so flexible. The free version does not give you nearly as numerous configurations 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 provides you use on infinite sites. You will also get a 40% discount if you would like to renew to keep on receiving support and upgrades after the first year (you can, obviously, continue using GeneratePress after the initial year without beating — you won’t get any more updates).

When You consider 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 want a niche-specific theme, you can probably save time by buying a theme that satisfies your needs for your market out of day one.

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

Additionally, It is among those fastest-loading WordPress themes you will find. Therefore, if you’re looking for the best performance possible, utilizing GeneratePress as your WordPress site’s base 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 second. Easy To Use WordPress Themes Free