Background New Themes WordPress 2016

Over the previous 10 decades, I have used a great deal of different WordPress themes and have been really disappointed. Up until recently, I had been using MyThemeShop, which was fairly good. But I had to do a lot of customization to make it do and work how I needed it to. A few weeks ago I decided to give GeneratePress a try, and let me just say, it’s undoubtedly the best WordPress theme I’ve found in 10 years. I had been blown away and am now moving all my sites to GeneratePress. I’ll go into exactly why in my comprehensive GeneratePress review under. And if you are wondering, yes I’ve attempted Genesis, Astra, OceanWP, Avada, X theme, Divi as well as several other lightweight and thicker multicolored themes. New Themes WordPress 2016

To Begin, Click here to download GeneratePress.

GeneratePress Review

GeneratePress is a totally free WordPress theme made by Tom Usborne, a developer from Canada. I have actually seen it for 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 great deal of stuff on there is not that good, or not encouraged for long. However, in this case, this was a mistake. The motif currently 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 premium version. I could tell right off the bat, the programmer was thinking precisely how I was envisioning a theme should work. And I will go into that more below, but let us first look at a number of the qualities. I’m going to be covering the superior version of the subject, since it’s worth . In fact, Tom, in the event that you ever read this and are seeing Scottsdale, Arizona, coffees on me.

Features

Super lightweight and fast. Modular design allowing you to enable/disable things you don’t need running. This is only one of the greatest reasons I adore GeneratePress.

Responsive, looks fantastic across all devices.

Schema built-in, for greater outcomes in SERPs.

Dramatic integration with the WordPress Customizer. I have not been a fan 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.

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

Translation ready.

Font awesome built in.

Tons of hooks and filters that make it good for programmers.

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

The Documentation can be unbelievable. Besides have great documentation on their site, the subject has been around long enough that everything I wholeheartedly throughout the setup process was found within a few seconds from their own forum.

Going Deep 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 quickly the base is. This tells me a lot of what I can expect by the time that I add everything to it. 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 layout was going to generate a whole lot of big files, but that isn’t the situation. You can tell that Tom actually worked hard on ensuring every file packed in GeneratePress is as small as possible. With HTTP/2, the amount of documents is not as important. However, the dimensions is! Take a peek at a few of the core 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

This is a programmer that cares about functionality! And I have Seen the same throughout each of the premium add-ons. They are literally as small as you can possibly get them. In reality, Font Awesome is probably the largest file contained. And that is not even his. Together with Font Awesome 5 coming round the cornerwe can anticipate this to get smaller too.

The premium add-ons Are setup in what I would call a modular layout. You can activate/deactivate anything you are not using to ensure they do not load on your website. Since the co-developer of the perfmatters plugin which has a script supervisor built, I felt right at home with this. Everything should be made this way.

If You are interested, I am using the next add-ons on this website:

Website

Colors

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 theme. This makes my life much simpler. No longer editing my functions.php or header.php files. I can literally upgrade my GeneratePress theme this exact minute rather than shed one customization. The hooks add-on certainly can help make this possible. It permits you to add custom code/PHP everywhere throughout your WordPress site. New Themes WordPress 2016

Other Things I Love About GeneratePress

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

You Can quickly swap a page involving 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 enabled from the superior add-ons. I can’t show you everything, otherwise, we would be here daily. However, let me show you few which really come in handy.

Responsive Columns

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

Desktop grid thickness

Tablet grid width

Mobile grid thickness

Insert Customized classes

Insert custom inline designs

Equal height columns

Here is An example below:

You May Want to Also grab his incredible WP Display Posts plugin too. See my featured posts on the sidebar of this site? That is using the WP Show Posts plugin. I have it set to display posts from a specific”featured” category. You might also have it show past modified/updated posts, 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 Sections add-on in the premium version of GeneratePress allows you to perform all sorts of things in terms of design. Consider it like a page builder with no bloat. GeneratePress is definitely not only for blogs! I am in reality using GeneratePress to our ecommerce website (perfmatters.io) which is operating Easy Digital Downloads. Don’t hesitate to check it out. But as you can see below, it looks nothing like a site.

Speed Tests

For all those Of you who are regular readers, you probably didn’t even notice that I changed the whole motif that powers 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 older MyThemeShop theme was pretty quickly, but I spent a lot of time scrutinizing it. In fact, I have gotten a great deal of emails from you guys asking me to print all of my customizations. My advice now is, simply get GeneratePress!

woorkup.com New GeneratePress Theme

Together with the New GeneratePress motif I managed to achieve faster speeds and 600 fewer lines of code! And keep in mind, I don’t have a child motif. Each of the customizations were created with the awesome 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 create a copy of woorkup for the new GeneratePress site library. I am happy to allow you to know that now you can put in my woorkup motif in your own GeneratePress site with just a single click! It is known as the Marketer motif. Get started using a great blog design instantly.

brianjackson.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

Additionally, I Moved within my personal website, brianjackson.io, to GeneratePress. Previously I had been using a theme from Array Themes. It is a pretty basic minimum website, as I don’t use it for much. As you can see it loaded pretty fast.

brianjackson.io New GeneratePress Theme

I was Able to duplicate the whole look 100 percent in GeneratePress in under one hour. And as you can see it loads faster! Amazing. I was even able to eliminate a few plugins which weren’t needed because of GP.

forgemedia.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

Additionally, I Moved over our business website, forgemedia.io, to GeneratePress. Previously I had been using a motif from Array Themes. It’s a fairly basic minimum website, as we just use it for our LLC. Since you can see it already loaded pretty quickly. New Themes WordPress 2016

forgemedia.io New GeneratePress Theme

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

I can not express my Excitement about locating GeneratePress and I am moving over all my websites to it (which includes several EDD e-commerce sites). Once I have my 9 websites all running in GP with no child topics, my life will be a breeze! The programmer has restored my faith in multi-purpose subjects , which when done the right way, can actually perform quicker.

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

What GeneratePress Is Good For…

GeneratePress Is the perfect option for performance-focused users who want to have the ability to personalize and control exactly how their site looks.

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

Because Of that, people who build WordPress sites for a living love GeneratePress. They will typically pair it with a WordPress page builder and use it for literally any kind of site.

However GeneratePress Might Not Be A Fantastic Combination If…

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

For Example, if you realize you want to produce a style blog, you might be happier picking out a market theme that is developed exclusively for trend 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 create GeneratePress look how you would like it to, you’ll almost certainly will need to go in and customize things. And while the substantial advantage 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 features that explain why GeneratePress is so common.

Lots Of Customization Options From The Real-Time WordPress Customizer

Past Functionality, another area where GeneratePress does nicely 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 make in real time.

The Free variant of GeneratePress gives you adequate options, but should you have GeneratePress Premium, you’ll have the ability to customize pretty much all about your site.

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

Header — you can move your header round and alter its styling
Navigation — GeneratePress gives you two different navigation options, such as sticky menus
Sidebar layout — you can use one or two sidebars
Blog post design — like featured image dimensions, metadata, etc..
Footer layout — just like how many widgets to add

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

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

All In all, GeneratePress will give you a lot more customization options in the WordPress Customizer than most other themes. This amount of detail might be a little overwhelming if you are a beginner. But once you understand how the preferences come together, you will have full control on how your site looks.

Optimized Performance And Fast Page Load Times

Across All its attributes, GeneratePress consistently has a focus on excellent performance and tidy code. The entire theme is less than 30 kB, and it will be about as small as you’ll ever find for a WordPress theme. Even most other optimized WordPress topics are still 200+ kB. And a few poorly coded topics can even surpass 1 MB!

GeneratePress Also has no code dependencies, which helps you avoid the leave blocking error that Google Pagespeed Insights often mentions.

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

First, I put up a vacant website using a haphazard 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 asks

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

Next, I activated GeneratePress on the exact same test website without changing anything else. Here is how GeneratePress did:

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% fewer

If You perform the exact same test with other themes, you’ll continue to find that GeneratePress is among the fastest-loading WordPress themes in life. New Themes WordPress 2016

Other Helpful Premium Extensions, Plus A Modular Approach

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

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

To Stay lightweight, GeneratePress also gives you a modular interface where you could pick and choose what features you want to trigger.

That Way, you do not have to slow your site down for a quality which 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 install.

Earlier In 2018, though, the programmer added a fresh Website Library feature for GeneratePress Premium users which allows you easily import any among those 25+ pre-built demonstration websites .

You Can import them directly from the 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 Provide You Detailed Control Over Each Piece Of Content

With Most topics, 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 new Design meta box for each and every page and post:

You Can utilize this meta box to:

Change the number of 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 components, such as your header, navigation menu, post 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’re using a WordPress page builder.

By Disabling certain components, you’re in a position to create the proper baseline for your own page builder design, making it effortless to create custom content as needed. New Themes WordPress 2016

GeneratePress Pricing: Affordable And Works On Unlimited Sites

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

Nevertheless, If you are seriously interested in utilizing GeneratePress, I feel you should buy the GeneratePress Premium plugin, as that is what produces the theme so flexible. The free version doesn’t give you nearly as many settings from the WordPress Customizer. And you will also miss out on the premade Site Library.

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

When You consider the normal premium WordPress theme will usually cost around $60, GeneratePress offers a fantastic price.

Wrap-up

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

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

But If you are willing to spend time altering preferences, then GeneratePress’ style controls give you the flexibility to turn it into any sort of WordPress site. Or, you may even have the ability to find a starter site that fits your needs to save some time.

Additionally, It’s among the fastest-loading WordPress topics that you will locate. Therefore, if you’re seeking the best performance possible, using GeneratePress as your WordPress site’s base is a good choice.

If You blend it with fast-loading hosting, so you shouldn’t have any difficulty making your site load in under one second. New Themes WordPress 2016