Background Generatepress And Woocommerce

Over the previous 10 years, I have used a great deal of different WordPress topics and have been really disappointed. Up until recently, I had been utilizing MyThemeShop, which was fairly excellent. However, I still had to do a lot of customization to allow it to do and work how I wanted it to. A few weeks ago I decided to provide GeneratePress a try, and let me just say, it’s by far the finest WordPress theme I have found in 10 years. I had been dismissed and am moving all my websites to GeneratePress. I will go into precisely why in my comprehensive GeneratePress review under. 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. Generatepress And Woocommerce

To Get started, Click here to download GeneratePress.

GeneratePress Review

GeneratePress is a free WordPress theme created by Tom Usborne, a programmer from Canada. I have really seen it for years in 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 ignore everything from the repository. Typically because a great deal of stuff on there is not that good, or not encouraged for long. However, in this case, this was a mistake. The motif currently has over half a million downloads, 80,000+ busy installs, with over 500 5-star ratings. So clearly Tom is doing some thing right here.

I Really installed 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 imagining a theme should get the job done. And I will go into that more below, but let’s first look at some of the features. I will be covering the superior version of the subject, because it’s worth very penny. In fact, Tom, if you read this and so are visiting Scottsdale, Arizona, java on me.

Features

Super lightweight and fast. Modular design allowing you to enable/disable things you do not want running. This is one of the biggest reasons I love GeneratePress.

Responsive, looks great across all devices.

Schema built-in, for better outcomes in SERPs.

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

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

Additionally, it works great with all the favorite fast-growing Elementor page builder. If you would like to dive into even more customizations, these are a terrific 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 great for programmers.

Great active service from the programmer. 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 wholeheartedly throughout the setup procedure was found inside a few seconds from their forum.

Diving Into GeneratePress

Now it is Time to the fun part! I always test a new theme right from the box with no customizations to just see how fast the foundation is. This tells me a lot of what I can expect by the time I add everything for this. Running the inventory GeneratePress WordPress motif on Kinsta hosting clocked in at a whopping 265 ms loading time. I was quite impressed.

One Thing I was worried about with GeneratePress was that the modular layout was going to generate a lot of big files, but this is not the situation. You can tell that Tom literally worked hard on making sure that every record packed in GeneratePress is as little as possible. With HTTP/2, the amount of documents is not as important. But the dimensions is! Have a peek at some of the center GeneratePress files below:

/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 the premium add-ons. They’re as small as possible get them. In fact, Font Awesome is probably the biggest file contained. And that is not even his. Together with Font Awesome 5 coming round the corner, we can anticipate this to get smaller also.

The premium add-ons Are setup 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 site. Since the co-developer of this perfmatters plugin which has a script supervisor built, I felt right at home for this. Everything ought to be made this way.

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

Blog

Colors

Copyright

Hooks

Page Header

Spacing

Typography

No Child Theme Needed

One of The best characteristics of GeneratePress is I no more need to use a young child motif . This makes my life so much easier. No longer editing my functions.php or header.php documents. I will literally update my GeneratePress theme this exact minute and not lose a single customization. The hooks add-on definitely can help make it possible. It permits you to add custom code/PHP everywhere throughout your WordPress site. Generatepress And Woocommerce

Other Things I Love About GeneratePress

On every Page/post you have a great deal of alternatives. You can change the sidebar design and the footer widgets.

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

The WordPress customizer options is where GeneratePress really shines! Remember, lots of these choices are permitted from the superior add-ons. I can’t show you everything, otherwise, we would be here all day. But allow me to show you few which really 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 the same programmer as GeneratePress. It allows you a super easy way to incorporate responsive columns into any page or article. Features include:

Desktop grid thickness

Tablet grid width

Mobile grid thickness

Insert Customized classes

Insert custom inline designs

Equal height columns

This is An example below:

You May Want to Also catch his incredible WP Display Posts plugin too. See my featured articles 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 can also have it show last modified/updated posts, recent articles, etc.. I’m using the free version and it works great.

To Get started, Click here to download GeneratePress.

Sections Add-on

The Segments add-in in the premium version of GeneratePress lets you perform all kinds of things concerning design. Consider it like a page builder with no bloat. GeneratePress is certainly not only for blogs! I’m in fact utilizing GeneratePress to our ecommerce site (perfmatters.io) that is running Easy Digital Downloads. Feel free to look it over. But as you can see below, it looks like a site.

Speed Tests

For those Of those that 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 theme 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 invested a lot of time scrutinizing it. In fact, I’ve gotten a lot of emails from you guys asking me to print all of my customizations. My advice today is, simply get GeneratePress!

woorkup.com New GeneratePress Theme

Together with the New GeneratePress theme I managed to achieve faster speeds and 600 fewer lines of code! And remember, I do not have a child theme. Each of the customizations were created with the wonderful 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 brand new GeneratePress site library. I am pleased to let you know that now you can put in my woorkup theme on your GeneratePress website with just a single click! It’s known as the Marketer theme. Get started with a great blog layout instantly.

brianjackson.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

Additionally, I Moved over my private site, brianjackson.io, to GeneratePress. Previously I had been using a theme from Array Themes. It is a pretty basic minimum site, 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 duplicate the entire appearance 100 percent in GeneratePress in under one hour. And since you can see it loads faster! Amazing. I was able to get rid of a couple plugins that 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 was using a theme from Array Themes. It’s a fairly basic minimum site, as we just use it for our LLC. As you can see it loaded pretty fast. Generatepress And Woocommerce

forgemedia.io New GeneratePress Theme

I had been 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’t express my Excitement about finding GeneratePress and I’m moving over all of my websites to it (which comprises some EDD e-commerce sites). Once I’ve got my 9 sites all running in GP without any child topics, my entire life will be a breeze! The developer has revived my faith in multi-purpose subjects , and that when done the correct way, can actually perform quicker.

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

What GeneratePress Is Good For…

GeneratePress Is the ideal option for performance-focused users that wish 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 performance, the site that you build will have a great foundation to make it load fast.

Since Of that, people who assemble WordPress websites for a living love GeneratePress. They’ll 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 that will immediately look perfect out of the box.

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

Even though GeneratePress is becoming a lot easier to use, thanks to its pre-built Website Library, GeneratePress still looks 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 while the significant benefit of GeneratePress is how customizable it is, some users, especially casual users, don’t like having to make those changes .

GeneratePress Features That Make It Unique

Here Are a few of the specific features that explain why GeneratePress is indeed popular.

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 is convenient because you’ll be able to see all the changes that you make in real time.

The Free version of GeneratePress provides you adequate possibilities, but should you own GeneratePress Premium, you will be able to customize nearly everything about your site.

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

• Header — you can move your header round and change its styling
• Navigation — GeneratePress gives you two different navigation options, including sticky menus
• Sidebar layout — you can utilize one or two sidebars
• Blog post design — such as featured image size, metadata, etc..
• Footer layout — like how many widgets to include

Similarly, The Typography place lets you control the font for every single element on your website, including buttons:

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

All In all, GeneratePress will provide you a lot more customization choices in the WordPress Customizer compared to most other themes. This amount of detail may be a little overwhelming if you’re a beginner. But as soon as you understand how the settings come together, you will have full control on how your website appears.

Optimized Performance And Quick Page Load Times

Across All of its features, GeneratePress always includes a focus on excellent performance and clean code. The whole motif 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 topics are still 200+ kB. And some poorly coded themes can even exceed 1 MB!

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

Put That collectively, and you get a superfast-loading motif. How fast? To give you a sense, I ran a small test.

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

That’s Not bad at all! However, GeneratePress can perform.

Next, I activated GeneratePress on the same test website without changing anything else. Here’s 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% 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. Generatepress And Woocommerce

Other Helpful Premium Extensions, Plus Much Modular Approach

Past Giving you more design controls from the WordPress Customizer, GeneratePress Premium also 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 — allows you create a unique page header on a per-page basis.
• Sections — this is kind of like lightweight page construction. It permits you to create separate”sections” on a page, each with their own layout and column settings.

To Stay lightweight, GeneratePress also gives you a modular interface where you can select and choose exactly which features you want to activate.

That Way, you do not need to slow your site down for a feature that you’re never going to use.

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

In The past, you had to construct GeneratePress websites from a blank canvas no matter what, which left the theme difficult for casual users to set up.

Earlier In 2018, however, the developer added a new Site Library feature for GeneratePress Premium users that allows 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 on a few buttons to import a presentation site.

Page-Level Settings Provide You Comprehensive Control Over Every Piece Of Content

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

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

You Can utilize this meta box to:

• Change the number of sidebars your site uses, or the sidebar orientation (like altering the sidebar from right to left)
• Choose the number of footer widgets to use
• Disable certain elements, such as your header, navigation menu, post featured picture, 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’re in a position to produce the proper baseline for your own page builder layout, which makes it effortless to create custom content as needed. Generatepress And Woocommerce

GeneratePress Replies: Cheap And Works On Unlimited Sites

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

Nevertheless, If you’re serious about using GeneratePress, I believe you need to purchase the GeneratePress Premium plugin, as that is what produces the theme so elastic. The free version doesn’t give you almost as many settings in the WordPress Customizer. And you will also miss out on the premade Site Library.

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

When You consider the normal premium WordPress theme will usually cost around $60, GeneratePress provides a fantastic price.

Summary

As I mentioned, I do not think GeneratePress is for everybody.

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

However, If you are willing to spend time changing preferences, then GeneratePress’ style controls give you the flexibility to flip it into any type of WordPress site. Or, you might even be able to locate a starter website that fulfills your needs to save some time.

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

If You combine it with fast-loading hosting, so you should have no problem making your site load in under one minute. Generatepress And Woocommerce

To Begin, Click here to download GeneratePress.