Intro Hide Main Navigation Slideout Menu Desktop Generatepress

Within the past 10 years, I have used a lot of different WordPress themes and have been very disappointed. Up until recently, I was using MyThemeShop, that was fairly excellent. But I still had to do a lot of customization to make it perform and operate the way 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 finest WordPress theme I’ve discovered in 10 years. I had been dismissed and am now moving all my websites to GeneratePress. I’ll go into precisely why in my in-depth GeneratePress review under. And if you are wondering, yes I’ve tried Genesis, Astra, OceanWP, Avada, X theme, Divi as well as several other lightweight and heavier multi-purpose themes. Hide Main Navigation Slideout Menu Desktop Generatepress

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’ve really seen it for many years in the WordPress repository. Most of you know that I’m pretty picky when it comes to web performance, so I tend to ignore everything from the repository. Typically because a lot of stuff on there isn’t that great, or not supported for long. However, in this case, this was a mistake. The motif currently has more than half a million downloads, 80,000+ active installs, with over 500 5-star evaluations. So obviously 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 superior 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’s first look at a number of the qualities. I will be covering the premium version of the subject, because it’s worth . Actually, Tom, in the event that you read this and so are visiting Scottsdale, Arizona, java on me.

Characteristics

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

Responsive, looks fantastic across all of the devices.

Schema built-in, for better results in SERPs.

Dramatic integration using the WordPress Customizer. I have not been a fan of the customizer in the past, but Tom does it correctly.

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

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

Translation ready.

Font awesome built-in.

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

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

The Documentation is also incredible. Besides have great documentation on their site, the subject has been around long enough that everything I Googled during the setup procedure was found within a few seconds from their own forum.

Going Deep Into GeneratePress

Now it’s Time for the fun part! I test a new theme right out of the box with no customizations to see how fast the base is. This tells me a lot of what I could 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 load time. I was very impressed.

One Thing I was concerned about with GeneratePress was that the modular layout was going to produce a lot of big files, but that is not the situation. You can tell that Tom literally worked hard on making sure every record packed in GeneratePress is as little as possible. Together with HTTP/2, the amount of files is not as important. But the size is! Take a look 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

That is a developer that cares about functionality! And I’ve Seen the same during all the premium add-ons. They are literally as small as possible get them. In reality, Font Awesome is most likely the largest file included. And that is not even his. With Font Awesome 5 arriving around the corner, we can anticipate this to get smaller also.

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

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

Website

Colors

Copyright

Hooks

Page Header

Spacing

Typography

No Child Theme Needed

One of The best characteristics of GeneratePress is that I no more need to use a Child theme. This makes my life much simpler. No longer editing my functions.php or header.php files. I will literally update my GeneratePress motif this very moment and not lose one customization. The hooks add-on certainly can help make it possible. It allows you to add custom code/PHP everywhere throughout your WordPress site. Hide Main Navigation Slideout Menu Desktop Generatepress

Other Things I Love About GeneratePress

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

You Can easily swap a page between the default option to a full width page, in addition to disable components.

The WordPress customizer options is really where GeneratePress really shines! Remember, lots of these choices are permitted by the premium add-ons. I can not show you everything, otherwise, we would be here daily. But allow me to show you couple which actually 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 the exact same developer as GeneratePress. It enables you a super simple way to incorporate responsive columns to any page or article. Features include:

Desktop grid width

Tablet grid thickness

Mobile grid width

Insert Customized classes

Insert custom inline designs

Equal height columns

Here is An example under:

You might want to Also grab his amazing WP Display Posts plugin also. See my featured articles on the sidebar of this website? 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 last modified/updated posts, recent articles, etc.. I am using the free version and it works great.

To Get started, Click here to download GeneratePress.

Sections Add-on

The Sections add-on in the premium edition of GeneratePress lets you do all sorts of things in terms of design. Think of it like a webpage builder with no bloat. GeneratePress is definitely not just for blogs! I’m in fact utilizing GeneratePress for our ecommerce site (perfmatters.io) which is operating Easy Digital Downloads. Don’t hesitate to look it over. But as you can see below, it looks nothing like a blog.

Speed Tests

For those Of you that are regular readers, you probably 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 motif which I had spent a year customizing. Here is a comparison below.

woorkup.com Old MyThemeShop Theme

My older MyThemeShop motif was pretty fast, but I spent a great deal of time customizing it. In fact, I have gotten a great deal of emails from you guys asking me to publish all of my customizations. My advice today is, just get GeneratePress!

woorkup.com New GeneratePress Theme

With the New GeneratePress motif I managed to attain faster speeds and 600 fewer lines of code! And remember, I don’t have a kid motif. All the customizations were created with the wonderful GP hooks and snippets plugin (both CSS and PHP).

Like the WordPress theme I’ve running on woorkup? You are in luck. Tom asked if he can create a copy of woorkup for the brand new GeneratePress site library. I’m happy to let you know that now you can put in my woorkup motif in your own GeneratePress site with just a single click! It’s called the Marketer theme. Get started with a great blog design immediately.

brianjackson.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

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

brianjackson.io New GeneratePress Theme

I had been Able to duplicate the entire appearance 100% in GeneratePress in under an hour. And as you can view it loads even 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 is a fairly basic minimal website, as we just use it to our LLC. Since you can see it already loaded pretty fast. Hide Main Navigation Slideout Menu Desktop Generatepress

forgemedia.io New GeneratePress Theme

I had been 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 faster! Amazing. I was able to get rid of a total of four plugins and it dropped my total page weight 2x!

I can’t express my Excitement about finding GeneratePress and I’m moving over all of my sites for this (which includes 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 restored my faith in multi-purpose subjects , which when done the correct way, can actually perform faster.

And The best news isI now have a billion more options to pick 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 perform pretty much anything. And since GeneratePress has a focus on performance, the website that you build will have a fantastic base to make it load quickly.

Because Of that, those who assemble 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.

But GeneratePress Might Not Be A Fantastic Combination If…

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

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

Even though GeneratePress is becoming a great deal simpler to use, as a result of its pre-built Site Library, GeneratePress still seems very barebones if you initially install it.

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

GeneratePress Features Which Make It Unique

Here Are some of the specific characteristics that clarify why GeneratePress is so popular.

Lots Of Customization Options From The Real-Time WordPress Customizer

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

GeneratePress Uses the WordPress Customizer for customization, which is convenient because you’ll have the ability to see all of the changes that you create in real time.

The Free version of GeneratePress gives you adequate options, but if you have GeneratePress Premium, you will have the ability to customize pretty much everything about your site.

For Example, if you go in the Layout area, you can configure detailed settings to your:

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

Similarly, The Typography place lets you control the font to get every single element on your site, 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 in the WordPress Customizer than most other topics. This level of detail might be a bit overwhelming if you are a beginner. But as soon as you realize the way the preferences come together, you’ll have complete control over how your website looks.

Optimized Performance And Fast Page Load Times

Across All of its features, GeneratePress always has a focus on excellent performance and tidy code. The whole theme is less than 30 kB, which is about as small as you’ll ever find for a WordPress theme. Even most other optimized WordPress themes are still 200+ kB. And some badly coded themes 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 cites.

Put That collectively, and you obtain a superfast-loading motif. How quickly? To give you an idea, I ran a small test.

First, I put up a vacant website using a random popular WordPress.org motif (Envo Magazine). After testing 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’s Not bad in any way! But GeneratePress can do better.

Next, I triggered GeneratePress on exactly the same test site without altering anything else. Here is how GeneratePress did:

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

If You perform that same test with other topics, you are going to continue to see that GeneratePress is among those fastest-loading WordPress themes in life. Hide Main Navigation Slideout Menu Desktop Generatepress

Other Useful Premium Extensions, Plus A Modular Approach

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

• 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 kind of like lightweight page construction. It permits you to create different”sections” on a webpage, each with their own design and column preferences.

To Remain lightweight, GeneratePress also provides you a modular port where you can select and choose exactly which characteristics you would like to trigger.

That Way, you do not have to slow down your site for a feature that you’ll never use.

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

In The last, you had to build GeneratePress sites from a blank canvas regardless of what, which left the motif difficult for casual users to set up.

Earlier In 2018, however, the developer added a new Site Library attribute for GeneratePress Premium users which lets you easily import any among those 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 on a few buttons to import a presentation site.

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

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

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

You Can use this meta box to:

• Change the number of sidebars your site uses, or the sidebar orientation (like changing the sidebar from right to left)
• Choose how many footer widgets to utilize
• Disable certain elements, such as your header, navigation menu, article featured image, 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 create the proper baseline for your page builder layout, which makes it effortless to create custom articles as needed. Hide Main Navigation Slideout Menu Desktop Generatepress

GeneratePress Replies: Cheap And Works On Unlimited Sites

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

Nevertheless, If you’re serious about utilizing GeneratePress, I feel you need to buy the GeneratePress Premium plugin, as that is what makes the theme so elastic. The free version doesn’t give you nearly as numerous configurations from the WordPress Customizer. And you’ll also miss out on the premade Site Library.

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

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

Summary

As I mentioned, I do not believe GeneratePress is for everyone.

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

But 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 site. Or, you might even be able to locate a starter website that fulfills your needs to save some time.

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

If You blend it with fast-loading hosting, so you should have no difficulty making your website load in under one minute. Hide Main Navigation Slideout Menu Desktop Generatepress

To Begin, Click here to download GeneratePress.