Intro Lightweight Search Engine

Within the past ten years, I’ve used a lot of different WordPress topics and have been very disappointed. Up until recently, I had been utilizing MyThemeShop, that was pretty excellent. But I still had to perform a great deal of customization to allow it to perform and work how I needed it to. A few of weeks ago I decided to provide GeneratePress a try, and let me just say, it is undoubtedly the finest WordPress theme I’ve found in 10 years. I was blown away and am moving all of my sites to GeneratePress. I’ll go into precisely why in my in-depth GeneratePress review under. And if you are wondering, yes I have attempted Genesis, Astra, OceanWP, Avada, X motif, Divi as well as several other lightweight and heavier multicolored themes. Lightweight Search Engine

To Get started, Click here to download GeneratePress.

GeneratePress Evaluation

GeneratePress is a free WordPress theme made by Tom Usborne, a programmer from Canada. I have really 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 tend to ignore everything from the repository. Typically because a lot of things on there isn’t that good, or not supported for long. Nonetheless, in this case, that 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 some thing right here.

I Actually 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 programmer 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 will be covering the premium version of the theme, because it’s worth . Actually, Tom, if 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 items you don’t need running. This is one of the biggest reasons I adore GeneratePress.

Responsive, looks great across all devices.

Schema built-in, for greater outcomes in SERPs.

Impressive integration using all 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 favorite fast-growing Elementor page builder. If you would like to dive into even more customizations, these are a terrific combo. I have also read that individuals using Beaver Builder have had success.

Resumes prepared.

Font wonderful built in.

Tons of filters and hooks that make it great for developers.

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

The Documentation can be unbelievable. Besides have good documentation on their website, the theme has existed long enough that what I wholeheartedly during the setup procedure was found inside a couple of seconds in their forum.

Diving Into GeneratePress

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

One Thing I was concerned about with GeneratePress was that the modular design was going to produce a lot of big files, but that is not the case. You can tell that Tom literally worked hard on making sure that every file packed in GeneratePress is as little as possible. Together with HTTP/2, the number of files is not as important. 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 programmer that cares about functionality! And I have Seen the same throughout each of the premium add-ons. They are as small as possible get them. In reality, Font Awesome is probably the biggest file included. And that is not even his. Together with Font Awesome 5 arriving around the corner, we could anticipate that to secure smaller also.

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

If You are interested, I am 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 I no longer have to use a Child motif . This makes my life so much easier. No longer editing my functions.php or header.php documents. I will literally update my GeneratePress motif this exact moment and not shed a single customization. The hooks add-on certainly helps make it possible. It permits you to add custom code/PHP everywhere throughout your WordPress website. Lightweight Search Engine

Other Things I Love About GeneratePress

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

You Can quickly swap a page between the default to a complete width page, as well as disable components.

The WordPress customizer choices is where GeneratePress really shines! Bear in mind, lots of these options are permitted from the premium add-ons. I can not show you everything, otherwise, we’d be here daily. But allow me to show you few which really come in handy.

Responsive Columns

Another Plugin I highly recommend grabbing is your free Lightweight Grid Columns. Not to my surprise, this can be created by the same programmer as GeneratePress. It enables you a super simple way to add responsive columns into any page or post. Features include:

Desktop grid width

Tablet grid width

Mobile grid width

Insert custom courses

Insert custom inline designs

Equal height columns

Here is An example under:

You might want to Also grab his incredible WP Show Posts plugin too. View my featured articles on the sidebar of this site? That is using the WP Display Posts plugin. I have it set to display posts from a particular”featured” category. You might also have it show last modified/updated articles, recent articles, 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 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 reality using GeneratePress for our ecommerce website (perfmatters.io) which is operating Easy Digital Downloads. Don’t hesitate to look it over. However, 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 motif that forces woorkup.com. It only took me about an hour for GeneratePress to mimic my MyThemeShop theme that I had spent a year customizing. Here’s a comparison under.

woorkup.com Old MyThemeShop Theme

My old MyThemeShop theme was already pretty fast, but I spent a lot of time customizing it. In fact, I’ve gotten a great deal of emails from you guys asking me to publish all my customizations. My advice now is, simply get GeneratePress!

woorkup.com New GeneratePress Theme

Together with the New GeneratePress theme I managed to attain faster speeds and 600 fewer lines of code! And remember, I don’t have a child theme. Each of the customizations were made 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 could create a replica of woorkup for the new GeneratePress site library. I’m happy to let you know that you can now put in my woorkup theme on your GeneratePress site with only a single click! It is called the Marketer motif. Get started using a fantastic blog design instantly.

brianjackson.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

Additionally, I Moved over my private website, brianjackson.io, to GeneratePress. Previously I had been using a motif from Array Themes. It’s a fairly basic minimum site, since I don’t use it to get much. As you can see it already loaded pretty quickly.

brianjackson.io New GeneratePress Theme

I was Able to duplicate the whole appearance 100 percent in GeneratePress in under one hour. And as you can see it loads even faster! Amazing. I was able to get rid of a couple plugins which weren’t needed due to 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 theme from Array Themes. It is a pretty basic minimum site, as we just use it for our LLC. As you can see it already loaded pretty fast. Lightweight Search Engine

forgemedia.io New GeneratePress Theme

I had been 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 managed to get rid of a total of four plugins and it dropped my total page weight 2x!

I can not express my Excitement about finding GeneratePress and I am moving over all my sites for this (which comprises several EDD e-commerce sites). Once I’ve got my 9 sites all running in GP without any child themes, 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 faster.

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

What GeneratePress Is Great For…

GeneratePress Is the perfect option for performance-focused users who wish to have the ability to customize and control precisely how their site looks.

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

Since Of that, people who assemble WordPress sites for a living love GeneratePress. They’ll normally pair it with a WordPress page builder and use it for literally any type of website.

But GeneratePress Might Not Be A Good Combination If…

…you Need something that will instantly look perfect out of the box.

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

Even though GeneratePress has gotten a great deal simpler to use, as a result of its pre-built Website Library, GeneratePress still looks very barebones when you initially install it.

So To create GeneratePress look how you want it to, you will almost certainly will need to go in and personalize matters. And though the significant benefit of GeneratePress is how customizable it is, many users, particularly 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 indeed popular.

Plenty Of Customization Options From The Real-Time WordPress Customizer

Past Functionality, another area where GeneratePress does well is its customization choices.

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

The Free version of GeneratePress gives you decent options, but should you own GeneratePress Premium, you’ll be able to customize pretty much all about your site.

For Example, if you go in the Layout region, you may configure detailed settings for yourown:

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

Similarly, The Typography place enables you to control the font to get each and every element on your site, such as buttons:

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

All In all, GeneratePress will give you a lot more customization choices from the WordPress Customizer compared to most other themes. This amount of detail may be a bit overwhelming if you are a beginner. But as soon as you realize how the preferences come together, you’ll have full control on how your website looks.

Optimized Performance And Quick Page Load Times

Across All of its attributes, GeneratePress consistently includes a focus on excellent performance and tidy code. The whole theme is less than 30 kB, which will be about as small 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 has no code dependencies, which helps you avoid the leave blocking error that Google Pagespeed Insights often cites.

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

First, I set up a vacant website using 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 requests

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

Next, I triggered GeneratePress on exactly the same test site without changing 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% less

If You do the exact same test with different themes, you’ll continue to find that GeneratePress is one of the fastest-loading WordPress topics in existence. Lightweight Search Engine

Other Useful Premium Extensions, Plus Much Modular Approach

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

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

To Remain lightweight, GeneratePress also gives you a modular port where you could select and choose exactly which features you want to trigger.

That Way, you don’t have to slow your site down for a feature 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 regardless of what, which left the theme difficult for casual users to set up.

Earlier In 2018, however, the developer added a new Website Library feature for GeneratePress Premium users that allows you easily import any one of the 25+ pre-built demonstration websites .

You Can import them right from the 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 Each Piece Of Content

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

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

You Can use this meta box to:

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

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

By Disabling certain components, you’re in a position to create the proper baseline for your page builder design, which makes it easy to create custom articles as needed. Lightweight Search Engine

GeneratePress Replies: Affordable And Works On Unlimited Sites

The Heart GeneratePress theme can be obtained at no cost at WordPress.org.

That said, If you are seriously interested in utilizing GeneratePress, I believe you need to purchase the GeneratePress Premium plugin, as that is what produces the theme so flexible. The free version doesn’t give you almost as numerous configurations from the WordPress Customizer. And you’ll also lose out on the premade Site Library.

GeneratePress Premium can be still fairly affordable. It costs just $39.95, and that provides you use on infinite websites . You’ll also get a 40% discount if you would like to renew to keep on receiving support and upgrades following the initial year (you can, of course, continue using GeneratePress following the first year without renewing — you just won’t get any more upgrades ).

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

Summary

As I mentioned, I do not 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 niche out of day one.

But If you are willing to spend some time changing settings, GeneratePress’ style controls give you the flexibility to flip it into any sort of WordPress site. Or, you might even be able to locate a starter site that fulfills your needs to save a little time.

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

If You blend it with fast-loading hosting, so you shouldn’t have any difficulty making your website load in under one minute. Lightweight Search Engine

To Get started, Click here to download GeneratePress.