Introduction Generatepress Hide Author

Within the past 10 years, I’ve used a great deal of different WordPress themes and have been very disappointed. Up until recently, I was utilizing MyThemeShop, that was pretty excellent. But I had to do a lot of customization to make it perform and operate how I wanted it to. A couple weeks ago I decided to provide GeneratePress a try, and let me just say, it’s undoubtedly the finest WordPress theme I have found in a decade . I had been dismissed and am moving all my sites to GeneratePress. I’ll enter precisely why in my comprehensive GeneratePress review under. And if you are wondering, yes I’ve tried Genesis, Astra, OceanWP, Avada, X motif, Divi in addition to several other lightweight and heavier multicolored themes. Generatepress Hide Author

To Begin, Click here to download GeneratePress.

GeneratePress Evaluation

GeneratePress is a totally free WordPress theme made by Tom Usborne, a developer from Canada. I have really seen it for many years from 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 dismiss everything in the repository. Typically because a great deal of things on there is not that good, or not supported for long. However, in this circumstance, this was a mistake. The theme currently has over half a million downloads, 80,000+ active installs, with over 500 5-star ratings. So clearly Tom is doing something right here.

I Really set up the free version of the motif 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 work. And I’ll go into that more below, but let us first look at a number of the qualities. I will be covering the superior version of the theme, because it’s worth very penny. In fact, Tom, if you ever read this and so are visiting Scottsdale, Arizona, java on me.

Features

Super lightweight and quick. 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 fantastic across all of the devices.

Schema built-in, for greater outcomes in SERPs.

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

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

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

Resumes prepared.

Font awesome built in.

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

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

The Documentation is also incredible. Besides have good documentation on their site, the subject has existed long enough that what I wholeheartedly during the setup procedure was found inside a few seconds in their forum.

Diving Into GeneratePress

Now it is Time for the fun part! I always test a brand new theme right from the box without any customizations to see how fast the base is. This tells me a great deal of what I can 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 loading time. I was quite impressed.

One Thing I was worried about with GeneratePress was that the modular design was going to produce a lot of big files, but this is not the situation. You may tell that Tom literally worked hard on ensuring that every file loaded in GeneratePress is as little as possible. With HTTP/2, the amount of documents is not as important. However, the dimensions is! Have a peek at some 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’ve Seen exactly the same during each of the premium add-ons. They’re literally as small as you can possibly get them. In fact, Font Awesome is probably the biggest file included. And that is not even his. With Font Awesome 5 coming around the corner, we could anticipate that to secure smaller also.

The premium add-ons Are setup in what I would call a modular layout. It is possible to activate/deactivate anything you aren’t using to guarantee they don’t load on your website. Since the co-developer of this perfmatters plugin which has a script supervisor built-in, I felt right at home with this. Everything should be designed this way.

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

Blog

Shades

Hooks

Page Header

Spacing

Typography

No Child Theme Needed

One of The best characteristics of GeneratePress is I no more need to use a Child motif . This makes my life much simpler. No more editing my functions.php or header.php files. I will literally upgrade my GeneratePress motif this exact minute and not shed a single customization. The hooks add-on definitely can help make this possible. It allows you to incorporate custom code/PHP anywhere throughout your WordPress site. Generatepress Hide Author

Other Things I Love About GeneratePress

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

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

The WordPress customizer choices is really where GeneratePress really shines! Remember, a lot of these options are enabled by the superior add-ons. I can’t show you everything, otherwise, we’d be here daily. However, let me show you couple which really come in handy.

Responsive Columns

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

Desktop grid width

Tablet grid thickness

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 amazing WP Display Posts plugin also. View 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 particular”featured” category. You can also have it show past modified/updated articles, 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 Segments add-in in the premium version of GeneratePress allows you to perform all sorts of things concerning design. Think of it like a page builder with no bloat. GeneratePress is definitely not only for blogs! I’m in fact using GeneratePress to our ecommerce site (perfmatters.io) that is operating Easy Digital Downloads. Feel free to look it over. However, as you can see below, it looks nothing like a site.

Speed Tests

For those Of you who are regular readers, you likely did not even notice I changed the entire theme that forces woorkup.com. It only took me about an hour for GeneratePress to mimic my MyThemeShop theme which I had spent annually customizing. Here’s a comparison below.

woorkup.com Old MyThemeShop Theme

My old MyThemeShop theme was already pretty quickly, but I spent a lot of time scrutinizing it. In reality, 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 theme I was able to attain faster speeds and 600 fewer lines of code! And remember, I don’t have a child 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’re in luck. Tom asked if he can make a replica of woorkup for the new GeneratePress blog library. I’m happy to let you know that now you can install my woorkup theme on your GeneratePress website with just a click! It’s called the Marketer theme. Get started using a fantastic blog layout immediately.

brianjackson.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

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

brianjackson.io New GeneratePress Theme

I was Able to replicate the entire look 100% in GeneratePress in under one hour. And since you can view it loads faster! Amazing. I was able to get rid of 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 was using a theme from Array Themes. It’s a pretty basic minimal website, as we just use it for our LLC. As you can see it loaded pretty fast. Generatepress Hide Author

forgemedia.io New GeneratePress Theme

I was Able to 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 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 am moving over all of my websites for this (which comprises several EDD e-commerce websites ). Once I’ve got my 9 sites all running in GP with no child topics, my life is going to be a breeze! The programmer 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 choices to choose from than I did before.

What GeneratePress Is Great For…

GeneratePress Is the ideal alternative for performance-focused users that want to be able to customize and control exactly how their site looks.

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

Because Of that, those who assemble WordPress sites for a living love GeneratePress. They’ll typically pair it with a WordPress site builder and use it for literally any kind of site.

But GeneratePress Might Not Be A Fantastic Combination If…

…you Need something which will immediately look perfect out of the box.

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

While GeneratePress has gotten a lot simpler to use, as a result of its pre-built Website Library, GeneratePress still looks very barebones if you first install it.

So To make GeneratePress look how you want it to, you’ll almost certainly will need to go in and personalize things. And while the substantial benefit of GeneratePress is how customizable it is, many users, particularly casual users, don’t like having to make those changes .

GeneratePress Features That Make It Unique

Here Are some of the specific features that explain why GeneratePress is indeed common.

Lots Of Customization Options From The Real-Time WordPress Customizer

Beyond Performance, another place where GeneratePress does well is its customization choices.

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

The Free variant of GeneratePress provides you adequate options, but should you have GeneratePress Premium, you’ll be able to customize nearly all about your website.

For Example, if you go into the Design region, 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 utilize a Couple of sidebars
Blog post layout — like featured picture size, metadata, etc..
Footer layout — just like the number of widgets to include

Similarly, The Typography area lets you control the font to get every single element on your website, such as buttons:

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

All In all, GeneratePress will give you much more customization options from the WordPress Customizer compared to most other themes. This amount of detail may be a little overwhelming if you’re a newcomer. But once you understand the way the settings come together, you will have complete control over how your site appears.

Optimized Performance And Quick Page Load Times

Around 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 surpass 1 MB!

GeneratePress Also does not have any code dependencies, which will help you avoid the render obstructing error that Google Pagespeed Insights often mentions.

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

First, I put up a vacant website utilizing a random popular WordPress.org motif (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 requests

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

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

Had a performance grade 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 do the exact same test with other topics, you’ll continue to see that GeneratePress is among those fastest-loading WordPress themes in existence. Generatepress Hide Author

Other Helpful Premium Extensions, Plus A Modular Approach

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

Elements — a exceptional feature which lets you create custom hooks, page headers, or layout templates.
Page Header — allows you create a unique page header onto a per-page basis.
Sections — that is sort of like lightweight page construction. It permits you to create different”sections” on a webpage, each with their own design and column settings.

To Remain lightweight, GeneratePress also gives you a modular interface where you can 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 which 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 sites from a blank canvas no matter what, which left the theme difficult for casual users to install.

Earlier In 2018, though, the developer added a fresh Site Library attribute for GeneratePress Premium users that allows you easily import any one of 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 presentation site.

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

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

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

You Can use this meta box to:

Change how many sidebars your website uses, or the sidebar orientation (such as altering the sidebar from right to left)
Choose how many footer widgets to use
Disable certain elements, such as your header, navigation menu, article featured picture, post 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 produce the proper baseline for your own page builder layout, which makes it effortless to create custom articles as needed. Generatepress Hide Author

GeneratePress Pricing: Cheap And Works On Unlimited Sites

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

Nevertheless, If you’re seriously interested in utilizing GeneratePress, I believe you should purchase the GeneratePress Premium plugin, as that’s what produces the theme so elastic. The free version doesn’t give you almost as many settings in the WordPress Customizer. And you’ll also miss out on the premade Site Library.

GeneratePress Premium can be still quite affordable. It costs just $39.95, which gives you use on infinite sites. You’ll also get a 40% discount if you want to renew to continue receiving support and upgrades following the first year (you can, of course, continue using GeneratePress after the first year without beating — you won’t get any more updates).

When You believe the typical premium WordPress theme will usually cost around $60, GeneratePress provides a great value.

Summary

As I said, I don’t think GeneratePress is for everyone.

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

But If you are ready to spend some time altering settings, GeneratePress’ mode controls give you the flexibility to turn it into any sort of WordPress website. Or, you might even be able to locate a starter website that fulfills your needs to save a little time.

Additionally, It’s among the fastest-loading WordPress themes you will locate. So if you’re looking for the best performance possible, utilizing GeneratePress as your WordPress site’s foundation is a great decision.

If You combine it with fast-loading hosting, you shouldn’t have any problem making your website load in under one second. Generatepress Hide Author