Intro Generatepress Mobile Logo

Within the past 10 decades, 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 good. But I still had to perform a great deal of customization to make it do and operate the way I needed 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 10 years. I had been dismissed and am moving all my sites to GeneratePress. I will enter precisely why in my in-depth GeneratePress review below. And if you’re wondering, yes I have attempted Genesis, Astra, OceanWP, Avada, X theme, Divi in addition to many other lightweight and thicker multi-purpose themes. Generatepress Mobile Logo

To Get started, Click here to download GeneratePress.

GeneratePress Review

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 realize that I’m pretty picky when it comes to web performance, so I have a tendency to ignore everything in the repository. Typically because a lot of stuff on there is not that great, or not encouraged for long. Nonetheless, in this circumstance, this was a mistake. The motif now has over half a million downloads, 80,000+ active installs, with over 500 5-star ratings. So clearly Tom is doing some thing right here.

I Really installed the free version of the theme and in a matter of 15 minutes purchased 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’s first look at a number of the features. I’m going to be covering the premium edition of the subject, because it’s worth . In fact, Tom, in the event that you ever 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 want running. This is one of the biggest reasons I adore GeneratePress.

Responsive, looks great across all of the devices.

Schema built-in, for better outcomes in SERPs.

Dramatic integration with all the WordPress Customizer. I haven’t been a fan of this customizer previously, but Tom does it correctly.

Compatible with all 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 want to dive into even more customizations, these really are a terrific combo. I have also read that individuals using Beaver Builder have experienced success.

Resumes prepared.

Font wonderful built in.

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

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

The Documentation is also unbelievable. Besides have good documentation on their website, the theme has existed long enough that what I wholeheartedly throughout the setup procedure was found inside a couple of seconds from their own forum.

Diving Into GeneratePress

Now it is Time to the fun part! I test a 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 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 worried about with GeneratePress was that the modular design was going to produce a whole lot of big files, but this isn’t the situation. You may tell that Tom actually worked hard on ensuring that every file loaded in GeneratePress is as small as possible. With HTTP/2, the amount of documents isn’t as significant. 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 exactly the same during each of the premium add-ons. They’re literally as small as possible get them. In fact, Font Awesome is most likely the largest file contained. And that isn’t even his. With Font Awesome 5 arriving around the corner, we could anticipate this to get smaller too.

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

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

Blog

Shades

Copyright

Hooks

Page Header

Spacing

Typography

No Child Theme Needed

One of The best features of GeneratePress is I no longer need to use a young child theme. This makes my life much easier. No more editing my functions.php or header.php files. I will literally upgrade my GeneratePress theme this very minute rather than shed a single customization. The hooks add-on certainly helps make this possible. It allows you to incorporate custom code/PHP anywhere throughout your WordPress website. Generatepress Mobile Logo

Other Things I Love About GeneratePress

On each 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 involving the default option to a complete width page, as well as disable components.

The WordPress customizer choices is where GeneratePress really shines! Bear in mind, a lot of these choices are enabled by the premium add-ons. I can not show you everything, otherwise, we would be here daily. However, 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 programmer as GeneratePress. It enables you a super simple way to incorporate responsive columns into any page or article. Characteristics include:

Desktop grid width

Tablet grid thickness

Mobile grid width

Add custom courses

Add custom inline designs

Equal height columns

Here is An example below:

You May Want to Also grab his amazing WP Show Posts plugin also. See my featured posts on the sidebar of this site? That’s using the WP Display Posts plugin. I have it set to display 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 do all sorts of things in terms of design. Consider it like a page builder with no bloat. GeneratePress is certainly not just for blogs! I’m in reality using 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 nothing like a site.

Speed Tests

For all those Of you that are regular readers, you likely did not even notice I changed the whole theme 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 under.

woorkup.com Old MyThemeShop Theme

My old MyThemeShop theme was already pretty fast, but I spent 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 now is, just get GeneratePress!

woorkup.com New GeneratePress Theme

Together with the New GeneratePress motif I managed to attain faster speeds and 600 fewer lines of code! And keep in mind, I do not have a kid motif. All 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 copy of woorkup to your brand new GeneratePress site library. I am happy to allow you to know that you can now put in my woorkup motif in your own GeneratePress website with just a single click! It’s known as the Marketer theme. Get started with a fantastic blog design immediately.

brianjackson.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

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

brianjackson.io New GeneratePress Theme

I had been Able to replicate the whole appearance 100% in GeneratePress in under one hour. And as you can view it loads faster! Amazing. I was even 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 minimal website, as we simply use it to our LLC. As you can see it loaded pretty fast. Generatepress Mobile Logo

forgemedia.io New GeneratePress Theme

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

I can’t express my Excitement about locating GeneratePress and I am moving over all of my websites for this (which comprises some EDD e-commerce websites ). Once I’ve got my 9 websites all running in GP without any child topics, my life is going to be a breeze! The developer has restored my faith in multi-purpose subjects , which when done the right way, can actually perform faster.

And The best thing is, I finally have a thousand more options to pick from than I did earlier.

What GeneratePress Is Great For…

GeneratePress Is the ideal option for performance-focused users who wish to have the ability to personalize and control exactly how their site appears.

You Can make GeneratePress perform pretty much anything. And since GeneratePress has a focus on performance, the site that you build will have a fantastic foundation to make it load quickly.

Because Of that, people who build WordPress websites for a living love GeneratePress. They’ll normally pair it with a WordPress page builder and use it for literally any kind of site.

However GeneratePress Might Not Be A Good Fit If…

…you Want something that will immediately appear perfect from the box.

For Example, if you realize you want to create a style blog, you may be happier picking out a niche theme that’s developed exclusively for fashion bloggers.

While GeneratePress has gotten a great deal simpler to use, thanks to its pre-built Website Library, GeneratePress still looks very barebones when you initially install it.

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

GeneratePress Features Which Make It Unique

Here Are a few of the specific characteristics that clarify why GeneratePress is indeed popular.

Lots Of Customization Options From The Real-Time WordPress Customizer

Past Performance, another area where GeneratePress does nicely is its customization options.

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

The Free variant of GeneratePress gives you decent possibilities, but should you have GeneratePress Premium, you’ll be able to customize pretty much all about your website.

For Example, if you go into the Design area, you may configure detailed settings for your:

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

Likewise, The Typography area lets you control the font to get each and every element on your site, including buttons:

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

All In all, GeneratePress will provide you a lot more customization options from the WordPress Customizer compared to most other themes. This amount of detail may be a bit overwhelming if you are a newcomer. But once you realize the way the preferences come together, you’ll have full control on how your site looks.

Optimized Performance And Fast Page Load Times

Around All of its features, GeneratePress always includes a focus on exceptional performance and tidy code. The whole motif 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 themes are still 200+ kB. And a few badly coded topics can even surpass 1 MB!

GeneratePress Also does not have any code dependencies, which helps you avoid the render obstructing 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 small test.

First, I put up a vacant website using a haphazard popular WordPress.org motif (Envo Magazine). After testing 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 requests

That is Not bad at all! But GeneratePress can do better.

Next, I triggered GeneratePress on the exact 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 asks, ~40% less

If You do the exact same test with other topics, you’ll continue to find that GeneratePress is one of the fastest-loading WordPress topics in life. Generatepress Mobile Logo

Other Useful Premium Extensions, Plus Much Modular Approach

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

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

To Stay lightweight, GeneratePress also gives you a modular port where you could select and choose what characteristics you would like to activate.

That Way, you don’t have to slow down your site 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 needed to construct GeneratePress sites from a blank canvas regardless of what, which left the theme difficult for casual users to install.

Earlier In 2018, however, the programmer added a new Site Library feature for GeneratePress Premium users which allows you easily import any among those 25+ pre-built demo sites.

You Can import them right from your WordPress dashboard.

Yes this Website 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 post and page will use the very same settings for the most part. You might have some custom templates or formats — however you do not have very much control past 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 the number of sidebars your website uses, or the sidebar orientation (such as changing 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 image, article title, or footer
• Create a special”container” for your page builder

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

By Disabling certain elements, you are in a position to create the correct baseline for your page builder layout, which makes it easy to create custom content as needed. Generatepress Mobile Logo

GeneratePress Replies: Affordable And Works On Unlimited Sites

The Heart GeneratePress theme can be obtained for free at WordPress.org.

That said, If you are serious about using GeneratePress, I feel you should purchase the GeneratePress Premium plugin, as that is what makes the theme so elastic. The free version doesn’t give you nearly as numerous settings from the WordPress Customizer. And you will also miss out on the premade Site Library.

GeneratePress Premium is also still fairly affordable. It costs only $39.95, and that provides you use on unlimited sites. You’ll 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 following the initial year without renewing — you just won’t get any more upgrades ).

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

Summary

As I said, I don’t believe GeneratePress is for everybody.

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

But If you are willing to spend some time altering settings, GeneratePress’ mode controls give you the flexibility to flip it into any sort of WordPress website. Or, you may even be able to find a starter site that fits your needs to save some time.

Additionally, It is among those fastest-loading WordPress topics that you will locate. Therefore, 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 should have no problem making your site load in under one minute. Generatepress Mobile Logo

To Begin, Click here to download GeneratePress.