Background Generatepress Export Settings

Within the previous 10 years, I have used a great deal of different WordPress themes and have been really disappointed. Up until recently, I was using MyThemeShop, that was pretty good. However, I had to do a great deal of customization to make it do and operate how I wanted it to. A couple weeks ago I decided to provide GeneratePress a try, and let me just say, it is by far the best WordPress theme I have found in a decade . I had been dismissed and am now moving all my sites to GeneratePress. I’ll enter exactly 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 several other lightweight and thicker multi-purpose themes. Generatepress Export Settings

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 years in the WordPress repository. Most of you know that I’m fairly picky when it comes to web performance, and so I have a tendency to dismiss everything in the repository. Typically because a great deal of stuff on there isn’t that good, or not encouraged for long. Nonetheless, in this case, that was a mistake. The theme now has over half a million downloads, 80,000+ busy matches, with over 500 5-star evaluations. So obviously Tom is doing something right here.

I Really set up 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 precisely 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 qualities. I’m going to be covering the superior edition of the theme, because it’s worth very penny. In fact, Tom, in the event that you read this and so are seeing Scottsdale, Arizona, java on me.

Features

Super lightweight and quick. Modular design allowing you to enable/disable things you don’t 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 greater results in SERPs.

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

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

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

Translation ready.

Font awesome built-in.

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

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

The Documentation can be incredible. Besides have great documentation on their site, the theme has been around long enough that what I Googled during the setup process was found inside a few seconds in their own forum.

Going Deep Into GeneratePress

Now it’s Time to 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 that I add everything to it. Running the stock GeneratePress WordPress theme on Kinsta hosting clocked in at a whopping 265 ms load time. I was very impressed.

One Thing I was concerned about with GeneratePress was that the modular layout was going to generate a whole lot of big files, but that is not 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 files is not as important. However, the dimensions is! Have a peek at a few of the core 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 have Seen exactly the same during all of the premium add-ons. They’re literally as small as possible get them. In reality, Font Awesome is probably the largest file contained. And that isn’t even his. Together with Font Awesome 5 arriving round the corner, we could expect this to secure smaller too.

The premium add-ons Are setup in what I’d call a modular design. It is possible to activate/deactivate whatever you are not using to guarantee they don’t load on your website. Since the co-developer of this perfmatters plugin which has a script supervisor built, I felt at home for this. Everything ought to be made this way.

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

Website

Colors

Copyright

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 Child theme. This makes my life so much easier. No more editing my functions.php or header.php files. I can literally update my GeneratePress theme this very minute rather than lose one customization. The hooks add-on certainly helps make it possible. It allows you to incorporate custom code/PHP anywhere throughout your WordPress site. Generatepress Export Settings

Other Things I Love About GeneratePress

On every Page/post that you have a lot of options. You are able to change the sidebar layout and the footer widgets.

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

The WordPress customizer options is really where GeneratePress really shines! Bear in mind, lots of these choices are permitted from the superior add-ons. I can’t show you everything, otherwise, we would be here daily. But let me show you couple which really come in handy.

Responsive Columns

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

Desktop grid thickness

Tablet grid thickness

Mobile grid thickness

Insert custom classes

Add custom inline styles

Equal height columns

Here is An example below:

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

To Get started, Click here to download GeneratePress.

Sections Add-on

The Segments add-in in the premium version of GeneratePress allows you to perform all sorts of things concerning design. Consider it like a webpage builder without the bloat. GeneratePress is definitely not only for blogs! I’m in reality using GeneratePress for our ecommerce site (perfmatters.io) which is operating Easy Digital Downloads. Feel free to look it over. However, as you can see below, it looks like a blog.

Speed Tests

For those Of you that are regular readers, you probably did not even notice that I changed the entire 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 is a comparison below.

woorkup.com Old MyThemeShop Theme

My old MyThemeShop motif was already pretty fast, but I invested a lot of time scrutinizing 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 motif I managed to achieve faster speeds and 600 fewer lines of code! And keep in mind, I don’t have a child motif. All the customizations were created with the wonderful GP hooks and snippets plugin (both CSS and PHP).

Like the WordPress theme I’ve 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’m happy to allow you to know that now you can install my woorkup theme on your GeneratePress site with only a click! It’s known as the Marketer motif. Get started with a great blog layout immediately.

brianjackson.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

I also Moved within my private site, brianjackson.io, to GeneratePress. Previously I was using a theme from Array Themes. It is a fairly basic minimal website, since I don’t use it for much. As you can see it loaded pretty quickly.

brianjackson.io New GeneratePress Theme

I was Able to duplicate the whole appearance 100% in GeneratePress in under an hour. And since you can view it loads faster! Amazing. I was able to eliminate a few plugins that weren’t needed because of 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 theme from Array Themes. It’s a fairly basic minimal site, as we simply use it to our LLC. Since you can see it already loaded pretty fast. Generatepress Export Settings

forgemedia.io New GeneratePress Theme

I was Able to move everything over and get it looking exactly how I wanted it in under an hour. And as 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 not express my Excitement about finding GeneratePress and I’m moving over all my sites to it (which includes several EDD e-commerce websites ). Once I have my 9 websites all running in GP without any child themes, my entire life is going to be a breeze! The developer has revived my faith in multi-purpose subjects , which when done the correct way, can actually perform faster.

And The best thing isI now have a thousand more options to pick from than I did earlier.

What GeneratePress Is Great For…

GeneratePress Is the perfect alternative for performance-focused users who want to be able to personalize and control precisely how their site appears.

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

Since Of that, people who build WordPress sites for a living love GeneratePress. They will typically pair it with a WordPress site builder and use it for literally any kind of site.

However GeneratePress Might Not Be A Good Combination If…

…you Want something which will instantly appear 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’s developed exclusively for trend bloggers.

While GeneratePress has gotten a great deal simpler to use, thanks to its pre-built Site Library, GeneratePress still looks very barebones when you initially 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 though the substantial advantage of GeneratePress is how customizable it is, some users, particularly casual users, don’t like having to make those changes themselves.

GeneratePress Features Which Make It Unique

Here Are some of the specific features that explain why GeneratePress is so popular.

Lots Of Customization Options From The Real-Time WordPress Customizer

Beyond Functionality, another area where GeneratePress does well is its customization options.

GeneratePress Utilizes the WordPress Customizer for customization, and this 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 adequate possibilities, but if you have GeneratePress Premium, you will have the ability to customize pretty much everything about your website.

For Example, if you go into the Design region, you may configure detailed settings for yourown:

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

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

And You also get a detailed 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 compared to most other topics. This level of detail might be a bit overwhelming if you are a newcomer. But once you realize the way the preferences come together, you’ll have complete control over how your website looks.

Optimized Performance And Quick Page Load Times

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

GeneratePress Also does not have any code dependencies, which helps you avoid the leave blocking error that Google Pagespeed Insights often mentions.

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

First, I put up an empty site utilizing a random popular WordPress.org motif (Envo Magazine). After analyzing its performance 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 is Not bad in any way! But GeneratePress can perform.

Next, I activated GeneratePress on the same test site without changing anything else. Here’s how GeneratePress did:

• 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 asks, ~40% less

If You do that same test with other topics, you’ll continue to see that GeneratePress is among the fastest-loading WordPress topics in life. Generatepress Export Settings

Other Useful Premium Extensions, Plus Much Modular Approach

Beyond Giving you more design controls from the WordPress Customizer, GeneratePress Premium also comes with a lot of other helpful features like:

• Elements — a exceptional feature that lets you create customized hooks, page headers, or design templates.
• Page Header — lets you create a unique page header onto a per-page basis.
• Sections — that is sort of like lightweight page construction. It lets you create separate”sections” onto a webpage, each with their own design and column settings.

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

That Way, you do not need to slow your site down for a quality which 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 sites from a blank canvas regardless of 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 which allows you easily import any one of the 25+ pre-built demonstration websites .

You Can import them directly from the WordPress dashboard.

Yes this site still uses GeneratePress! All I did was click a couple buttons to import a presentation site.

Page-Level Settings Give You Detailed Control Over Each Piece Of Content

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

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

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 how many footer widgets to utilize
• Disable certain elements, such as your header, navigation menu, article featured picture, post title, or footer
• Produce a special”container” to your own page builder

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

By Disabling certain components, you’re able to produce the proper baseline for your page builder design, which makes it easy to create custom articles as needed. Generatepress Export Settings

GeneratePress Replies: Affordable And Works On Unlimited Sites

The Core GeneratePress theme is available at no cost at WordPress.org.

Nevertheless, If you are seriously interested in utilizing GeneratePress, I feel you should purchase the GeneratePress Premium plugin, as that is what makes the theme so flexible. The free version does not give you almost as many settings from the WordPress Customizer. And you will also lose out on the premade Site Library.

GeneratePress Premium is also still quite affordable. It costs just $39.95, which provides you use on unlimited sites. You will also get a 40% discount if you would like to renew to keep on receiving support and updates after the initial year (you can, obviously, continue using GeneratePress following the initial year without renewing — you won’t receive any more upgrades ).

When You believe that the normal premium WordPress theme will often cost around $60, GeneratePress provides a fantastic value.

Conclusion

As I said, 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 from day one.

But If you are willing to spend time altering settings, GeneratePress’ mode controls give you the flexibility to flip it into any type of WordPress website. Or, you might even have the ability to find a starter site that fits your needs to save a little time.

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

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

To Get started, Click here to download GeneratePress.