Background Generatepress Responsive Menu

Within the previous ten decades, I’ve used a lot of different WordPress themes and have been very disappointed. Up until recently, I was using MyThemeShop, that was pretty good. But I still had to perform a great deal of customization to make it do and work the way I needed it to. A couple of 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 was blown away and am moving all my sites to GeneratePress. I will enter exactly why in my comprehensive GeneratePress review under. And if you’re wondering, yes I’ve tried Genesis, Astra, OceanWP, Avada, X theme, Divi as well as many other lightweight and heavier multi-purpose themes. Generatepress Responsive Menu

To Get started, Click here to download GeneratePress.

GeneratePress Evaluation

GeneratePress is a totally free WordPress theme made by Tom Usborne, a programmer from Canada. I’ve 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 have a tendency to ignore everything from 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+ busy installs, with over 500 5-star ratings. So obviously Tom is doing something right here.

I Actually installed the free version of the theme and in a matter of 15 minutes bought the superior version. I could tell right off the bat, the programmer was thinking precisely how I was envisioning a theme should get the job done. And I’ll go into that more below, but let’s first look at some of the features. I will be covering the premium version of the theme, because it’s worth . In fact, Tom, in the event that you ever read this and so are seeing Scottsdale, Arizona, coffees on me.

Features

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

Responsive, looks great across all devices.

Schema built-in, for greater outcomes in SERPs.

Impressive integration with all the WordPress Customizer. I haven’t 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. Great browser support back to IE8.

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

Translation ready.

Font wonderful built in.

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

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

The Documentation can be unbelievable. Besides have good documentation on their site, the subject has been around long enough that what I Googled during the setup procedure was found within a few seconds in their forum.

Going Deep Into GeneratePress

Now it’s Time to the fun part! I always test a brand new theme right out of the box with no customizations to see how quickly the base is. This tells me a great deal of what I could expect by the time that I add everything for this. Running the stock GeneratePress WordPress motif on Kinsta hosting clocked in at a whopping 265 ms loading time. I was very impressed.

One Thing I was concerned about with GeneratePress was that the modular layout was going to produce a whole lot of big files, but this isn’t the case. You can tell that Tom actually worked hard on making sure that every file loaded in GeneratePress is as little as possible. Together with HTTP/2, the number of files is not as significant. However, the size is! Take a look at a few 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

That is a developer that cares about performance! And I have Seen the same throughout all of the premium add-ons. They are 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. With Font Awesome 5 arriving around the corner, we can expect that to secure smaller also.

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

If You are curious, I am using the next add-ons on this site:

Blog

Shades

Copyright

Hooks

Page Header

Spacing

Typography

No Child Theme Needed

One of The best characteristics of GeneratePress is that I no longer need to use a young child motif . This makes my life much easier. No more editing my functions.php or header.php documents. I will literally upgrade my GeneratePress motif this very minute and not shed a single customization. The hooks add-on definitely helps make this possible. It allows you to incorporate custom code/PHP anywhere throughout your WordPress website. Generatepress Responsive Menu

Other Things I Love About GeneratePress

On every Page/post that you have a lot of options. You can change the sidebar design and the footer widgets.

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

The WordPress customizer choices is where GeneratePress really shines! Bear in mind, a lot of these options are enabled by the superior add-ons. I can’t show you everything, otherwise, we’d be here all day. But allow me to show you few 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 created by precisely the exact same developer as GeneratePress. It allows you a super simple way to incorporate responsive columns to any page or post. Characteristics include:

Desktop grid width

Tablet grid thickness

Mobile grid width

Add custom classes

Add custom inline styles

Equal height columns

This is An example under:

You May Want to Also grab his incredible WP Show Posts plugin also. View 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 specific”featured” category. You can also get it show past modified/updated posts, recent posts, etc.. I am 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 edition of GeneratePress allows you to do all kinds of things in terms of design. Consider it like a page builder with no bloat. GeneratePress is certainly not only for blogs! I’m in reality utilizing GeneratePress for our ecommerce site (perfmatters.io) that is operating Easy Digital Downloads. Feel free to look it over. But as you can see below, it looks like a site.

Speed Tests

For all those Of you that are regular readers, you likely didn’t even notice I changed the entire theme that powers woorkup.com. It just took me about an hour to get GeneratePress to mimic my MyThemeShop theme that I had spent annually customizing. Here is a comparison below.

woorkup.com Old MyThemeShop Theme

My old MyThemeShop theme was pretty quickly, but I spent a lot of time customizing it. In fact, I have gotten a lot of emails from you guys asking me to print all my customizations. My advice now 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 don’t have a kid theme. Each of the customizations were created using the awesome 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 can create a replica of woorkup to your new GeneratePress site library. I am happy to let you know that you can now install my woorkup theme on your own GeneratePress website with just a click! It is known as the Marketer theme. Get started using a fantastic blog layout 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’s a fairly basic minimum site, since I don’t use it to get much. Since you can see it loaded pretty quickly.

brianjackson.io New GeneratePress Theme

I was Able to replicate the entire appearance 100% in GeneratePress in under one hour. And as you can see it loads faster! Amazing. I was able to get rid of a few plugins which 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 had been using a motif from Array Themes. It is a fairly basic minimum website, as we just use it to our LLC. As you can see it already loaded pretty quickly. Generatepress Responsive Menu

forgemedia.io New GeneratePress Theme

I was Able to move everything over and get it looking just how I wanted it in under one hour. And as 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 not express my Excitement about locating GeneratePress and I am moving over all of my websites for this (which comprises several EDD e-commerce sites). After I’ve got my 9 websites all running in GP with no child topics, my life will be a breeze! The developer has revived my faith in multi-purpose themes, which when done the right way, can actually perform faster.

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

What GeneratePress Is Great For…

GeneratePress Is the ideal option for performance-focused users that wish to be able to personalize and control exactly how their site appears.

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

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

However GeneratePress Might Not Be A Good Combination If…

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

For Example, if you realize you wish to produce a fashion blog, you may be happier choosing a niche theme that’s developed exclusively for trend bloggers.

While GeneratePress is becoming a great deal simpler to use, as a result of its pre-built Website Library, GeneratePress still seems very barebones when you initially install it.

So To make GeneratePress look how you want it to, you’ll most likely will need to go in and personalize matters. And while the substantial benefit of GeneratePress is how customizable it is, many users, especially casual users, do not like having to make those changes themselves.

GeneratePress Features Which Make It Unique

Here Are a few of the specific characteristics that clarify why GeneratePress is so common.

Lots Of Customization Options From The Real-Time WordPress Customizer

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

GeneratePress Utilizes the WordPress Customizer for customization, and this is convenient as you will be able to see all the changes that you make in real time.

The Free variant of GeneratePress gives you adequate possibilities, but if you own GeneratePress Premium, you’ll be able to customize nearly all about your site.

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

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

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

And You also receive a thorough area to control the colour of every single element on your site.

All Whatsoever, GeneratePress will provide you much more customization options from the WordPress Customizer compared to most other topics. This amount of detail may be a bit overwhelming if you’re a newcomer. But as soon as you understand how the preferences come together, you’ll have full control on how your website appears.

Optimized Performance And Quick Page Load Times

Across All of its attributes, GeneratePress consistently has a focus on exceptional performance and clean code. The whole motif is less than 30 kB, and it will be about as little as you’ll ever find for a WordPress theme. Even most other optimized WordPress topics are still 200+ kB. And a few badly coded themes 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 cites.

Put That together, and you obtain 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 motif (Envo Magazine). After testing its performance with Pingdom, it

• Had a performance grade of 77
• Loaded in 1.05 moments
• Had a page size of 243.9 kB
• Had 15 requests

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

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

• Had a performance grade of 87, 10 points better
• Loaded in 666 ms, ~37% quicker
• Had a page size of 26.8 kB, ~90% smaller
• Had 9 asks, ~40% fewer

If You perform that same test with other themes, you are going to continue to see that GeneratePress is one of those fastest-loading WordPress topics in life. Generatepress Responsive Menu

Other Helpful Premium Extensions, Plus Much Modular Approach

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

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

To Remain lightweight, GeneratePress also gives you a modular port where you can select and choose what characteristics you want to activate.

That Way, you don’t have 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 needed to construct GeneratePress websites from a blank canvas regardless of what, which made the motif difficult for casual users to install.

Earlier In 2018, though, the developer added a new Site 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 a few buttons to import a demo site.

Page-Level Settings Provide You Comprehensive Control Over Each Bit Of Content

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

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

You Can use this meta box to:

• Change how many sidebars your site uses, or the sidebar orientation (such as changing the sidebar from right to left)
• Choose the number of footer widgets to utilize
• Disable certain elements, such as your header, navigation menu, post featured picture, post title, or footer
• Produce a special”container” for your own page builder

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

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

GeneratePress Replies: Affordable And Works On Unlimited Sites

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

That said, If you are serious about utilizing GeneratePress, I believe you need to buy the GeneratePress Premium plugin, as that’s what makes the theme so elastic. The free version does not give you almost as numerous settings from the WordPress Customizer. And you’ll also lose out on the premade Site Library.

GeneratePress Premium is also still fairly affordable. It costs only $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 upgrades following the first year (you can, obviously, continue using GeneratePress after the first year without renewing — you just won’t receive any more upgrades ).

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

Conclusion

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

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

However, If you’re willing to spend some time changing settings, GeneratePress’ mode controls give you the flexibility to turn it into any type of WordPress website. Or, you may even be able to find a starter site that fulfills your needs to save some time.

Additionally, It’s one of the fastest-loading WordPress themes you will find. Therefore, if you’re looking for the best performance possible, utilizing GeneratePress as your WordPress site’s foundation is a good decision.

If You combine it with fast-loading hosting, you should have no problem making your website load in under one second. Generatepress Responsive Menu

To Get started, Click here to download GeneratePress.