Introduction Generatepress Active Link Background Color

Over the previous ten years, I’ve used a lot of different WordPress themes and have been very disappointed. Up until recently, I had been using MyThemeShop, that was pretty excellent. However, I still had to perform a lot of customization to allow it to perform and work the way I needed it to. A few weeks ago I decided to give GeneratePress a try, and let me just say, it is by far the finest WordPress theme I have discovered in a decade . I had been dismissed and am now moving all of my websites to GeneratePress. I’ll go into exactly why in my in-depth GeneratePress review under. And if you’re wondering, yes I’ve attempted Genesis, Astra, OceanWP, Avada, X theme, Divi as well as many other lightweight and heavier multi-purpose themes. Generatepress Active Link Background Color

To Get started, Click here to download GeneratePress.

GeneratePress Evaluation

GeneratePress is a totally free WordPress theme created by Tom Usborne, a programmer from Canada. I have actually seen it for many years from the WordPress repository. Most of you realize that I’m fairly picky when it comes to web performance, and so I tend to ignore everything in the repository. Typically because a lot of things on there isn’t that good, or not supported for long. However, in this case, that was a mistake. The motif currently has over half a million downloads, 80,000+ busy matches, 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 bought 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 some of the features. I’m going to be covering the premium edition of the theme, because it’s worth very penny. Actually, Tom, if you ever read this and are seeing Scottsdale, Arizona, java on me.

Characteristics

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

Responsive, looks fantastic across all of the devices.

Schema built-in, for better results in SERPs.

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

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

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

Resumes prepared.

Font wonderful built-in.

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

Great active support from the programmer. On average, 3 updates per month.

The Documentation is also unbelievable. Besides have good documentation on their site, the theme has been around long enough that everything I wholeheartedly throughout the setup procedure was found within a few seconds from their own forum.

Going Deep Into GeneratePress

Now it’s Time for the fun part! I test a new theme right out of the box without any customizations to just see how quickly the base is. This tells me a lot of what I could expect by the time I add everything for this. Running the stock GeneratePress WordPress motif 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 produce a lot of big files, but this isn’t the situation. You may tell that Tom literally worked hard on making sure every file loaded in GeneratePress is as little as possible. With HTTP/2, the amount of files isn’t as important. However, the size is! Take a look 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 have Seen the same throughout all the premium add-ons. They’re literally as small as you can possibly get them. In reality, Font Awesome is most likely the largest file contained. And that is not even his. Together with Font Awesome 5 coming round the corner, we could expect that to secure smaller too.

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

If You’re curious, I’m using the following 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 longer have to use a Child motif . This makes my life so much simpler. No more editing my functions.php or header.php files. I will literally upgrade my GeneratePress theme this very moment and not lose a single customization. The hooks add-on definitely helps make it possible. It permits you to incorporate custom code/PHP anywhere throughout your WordPress site. Generatepress Active Link Background Color

Other Things I Love About GeneratePress

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

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

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

Responsive Columns

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

Desktop grid width

Tablet grid thickness

Mobile grid thickness

Insert Customized courses

Add custom inline designs

Equal height columns

Here is An example below:

You May Want to Also grab his incredible WP Show Posts plugin also. View my featured posts on the sidebar of this website? That’s using the WP Show Posts plugin. I have it set to display posts from a particular”featured” category. You might also get it show last modified/updated articles, 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. Consider it like a page builder with no bloat. GeneratePress is definitely not just for blogs! I’m in fact utilizing GeneratePress to our ecommerce website (perfmatters.io) which is running Easy Digital Downloads. Don’t hesitate to look it over. However, 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 that I changed the whole theme that powers woorkup.com. It just took me about an hour for GeneratePress to mimic my MyThemeShop motif that I had spent annually customizing. Here’s a comparison under.

woorkup.com Old MyThemeShop Theme

My older MyThemeShop motif was already pretty fast, but I invested a great deal of time customizing 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 motif I was able to achieve faster speeds and 600 fewer lines of code! And remember, I do not have a kid motif. Each of the customizations were made using the wonderful GP hooks and snippets plugin (both CSS and PHP).

Like the WordPress theme I’ve working on woorkup? You are in luck. Tom asked if he could make a copy of woorkup for the brand new GeneratePress blog library. I am pleased to allow you to know that you can now put in my woorkup motif in your GeneratePress site with just a single click! It is called the Marketer theme. Get started with a fantastic blog design instantly.

brianjackson.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

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

brianjackson.io New GeneratePress Theme

I was Able to replicate the entire appearance 100 percent in GeneratePress in under one hour. And since you can see it loads faster! Amazing. I was even 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 business website, forgemedia.io, to GeneratePress. Previously I was using a motif from Array Themes. It’s a fairly basic minimal website, as we simply use it to our LLC. Since you can see it already loaded pretty fast. Generatepress Active Link Background Color

forgemedia.io New GeneratePress Theme

I had been Able to 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 was able to eliminate a total of four plugins and it dropped my whole page weight 2x!

I can’t express my Excitement about finding GeneratePress and I am moving over all my sites for this (which includes some EDD e-commerce websites ). Once I have my 9 websites all running in GP with no child themes, my entire life will be a breeze! The programmer has revived my faith in multi-purpose subjects , and that when done the correct way, can actually perform quicker.

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

What GeneratePress Is Great 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 since GeneratePress has a focus on performance, the site that you build will have a fantastic base to make it load quickly.

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

But GeneratePress Might Not Be A Good Fit If…

…you Need something that will immediately appear perfect out of the box.

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

While GeneratePress is becoming a lot easier to use, as a result of its pre-built Website Library, GeneratePress still looks very barebones when you first install it.

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

GeneratePress Features Which Make It Unique

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

Plenty Of Customization Options From The Real-Time WordPress Customizer

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

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

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

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

Header — you can move your header around and alter its own styling
Navigation — GeneratePress gives you two different navigation options, such as sticky menus
Sidebar design — you can use one or two sidebars
Blog post design — such as featured picture dimensions, metadata, etc..
Footer layout — like the number of widgets to include

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

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

All In all, GeneratePress will give you a lot more customization options in the WordPress Customizer compared to most other topics. This amount of detail might be a bit overwhelming if you are a beginner. But once you realize the way the preferences come together, you’ll have full control over how your website appears.

Optimized Performance And Fast Page Load Times

Across All its features, GeneratePress consistently includes a focus on excellent performance and clean 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.

Put That together, and you obtain a superfast-loading motif. How fast? To give you an idea, I ran a small test.

First, I put up a vacant website using a random popular WordPress.org motif (Envo Magazine). After testing its performance 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 do better.

Next, I activated GeneratePress on exactly the same test site without changing anything else. Here is how GeneratePress failed:

Had a performance tier 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% less

If You perform the exact same test with different themes, you are going to continue to find that GeneratePress is one of the fastest-loading WordPress themes in existence. Generatepress Active Link Background Color

Other Helpful Premium Extensions, Plus Much Modular Approach

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

Elements — a unique feature which lets you create custom hooks, page headers, or layout templates.
Page Header — allows 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” onto a webpage, each with their own design and column settings.

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

That Way, you don’t need to slow your site down for a quality that you’re never going to use.

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

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

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

You Can import them directly from your WordPress dashboard.

Yes this site 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 Each Bit Of Content

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

GeneratePress Changes that by providing you a new Layout meta box for each and every 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 the number of footer widgets to use
Disable certain components, like your header, navigation menu, article featured image, post title, or footer
Create 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 able to create the correct baseline for your page builder layout, which makes it easy to create custom articles as needed. Generatepress Active Link Background Color

GeneratePress Pricing: Affordable And Works On Unlimited Sites

The Core GeneratePress motif is available for free at WordPress.org.

Nevertheless, If you are seriously interested in using GeneratePress, I feel you should purchase the GeneratePress Premium plugin, as that’s what makes the theme so elastic. The free version doesn’t give you almost as numerous configurations in the WordPress Customizer. And you will also miss out on the premade Site Library.

GeneratePress Premium is also still fairly reasonably priced. It costs just $39.95, which provides you use on unlimited websites . You will also get a 40% discount if you want to renew to keep on receiving support and updates after the first year (you can, obviously, keep using GeneratePress following the first year without renewing — you just won’t receive any more updates).

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

Summary

As I said, I do not believe GeneratePress is for everybody.

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

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

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

If You blend it with fast-loading hosting, so you shouldn’t have any problem making your website load in under one minute. Generatepress Active Link Background Color