Background Nice WordPress Themes

Within the past ten years, I have used a great deal of different WordPress topics and have been very disappointed. Up until recently, I was using MyThemeShop, that was fairly excellent. However, I still had to perform a great deal of customization to allow it to do and operate the way I wanted it to. A couple of weeks ago I decided to give GeneratePress a try, and let me just say, it is by far the finest WordPress theme I’ve found in a decade . I was dismissed and am moving all of my sites to GeneratePress. I will go into precisely why in my comprehensive GeneratePress review below. And if you’re wondering, yes I have tried Genesis, Astra, OceanWP, Avada, X theme, Divi as well as several other lightweight and heavier multi-purpose themes. Nice WordPress Themes

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 actually seen it for many years from the WordPress repository. Most of you know that I am pretty picky when it comes to web performance, so I tend to ignore everything from the repository. Typically because a great deal of stuff on there is not that great, or not encouraged for long. Nonetheless, in this circumstance, this was a mistake. The theme currently has over half a million downloads, 80,000+ active installs, with over 500 5-star evaluations. So obviously Tom is doing something right here.

I Actually set up 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 developer was thinking precisely how I was envisioning a theme should get the job done. And I will go into that more below, but let’s first look at some of the qualities. I will be covering the superior edition of the theme, because it’s worth very penny. Actually, Tom, in the event that you read this and so are visiting Scottsdale, Arizona, java on me.

Features

Super lightweight and fast. 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 with all the WordPress Customizer. I haven’t been a lover of the customizer previously, but Tom does it correctly.

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

It also works great with the favorite fast-growing Elementor page builder. If you would like to dive into even more customizations, these really 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 which make it great for programmers.

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

The Documentation is also incredible. Besides have good documentation on their site, the subject has existed long enough that what I wholeheartedly during the setup process was found inside a couple of seconds from their own forum.

Diving Into GeneratePress

Now it is Time for the fun part! I always test a new theme right out of the box with no customizations to see how quickly the base is. This tells me a lot 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 lot of big files, but that isn’t the case. You may tell that Tom literally worked hard on ensuring every file packed in GeneratePress is as small as possible. With HTTP/2, the number of files isn’t as significant. However, the size is! Have a peek 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 the premium add-ons. They’re as small as possible get them. In fact, Font Awesome is most likely the biggest file included. And that is not even his. Together with Font Awesome 5 coming around the cornerwe could expect this to secure smaller also.

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

If You are curious, I am using the following add-ons on this website:

Website

Shades

Copyright

Hooks

Page Header

Spacing

Typography

No Child Theme Needed

One of The best features of GeneratePress is I no more have to use a young child theme. This makes my life much easier. No longer editing my functions.php or header.php documents. I can literally update my GeneratePress motif this very minute rather than lose one customization. The hooks add-on certainly helps make it possible. It permits you to incorporate custom code/PHP everywhere throughout your WordPress website. Nice WordPress Themes

Other Things I Love About GeneratePress

On every Page/post you have a great deal of alternatives. You are able to change the sidebar layout and the footer widgets.

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

The WordPress customizer choices is really where GeneratePress really shines! Remember, lots of these choices are permitted from the superior 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 your free Lightweight Grid Columns. Not to my surprise, this is also 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 width

Tablet grid thickness

Mobile grid width

Add custom classes

Insert custom inline designs

Equal height columns

Here is An example below:

You May Want to Also catch his incredible WP Show Posts plugin too. See 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 particular”featured” category. You might also get it show last modified/updated posts, recent posts, etc.. I am 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 lets you perform all sorts of things concerning design. Think of it like a page builder with no bloat. GeneratePress is definitely not only for blogs! I am in fact utilizing GeneratePress for our ecommerce website (perfmatters.io) that is running Easy Digital Downloads. Don’t hesitate to check it out. 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 that I changed the entire theme that forces woorkup.com. It only took me about an hour for GeneratePress to mimic my MyThemeShop motif which I had spent a year customizing. Here is a comparison under.

woorkup.com Old MyThemeShop Theme

My old MyThemeShop motif was already pretty quickly, but I invested a lot of time customizing it. In reality, I have 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 was able to achieve faster speeds and 600 fewer lines of code! And keep in mind, I don’t have a kid motif. Each of the customizations were made using the awesome GP hooks and snippets plugin (both CSS and PHP).

Like the WordPress theme I have working on woorkup? You are in luck. Tom asked if he could make a replica of woorkup to your brand new GeneratePress site library. I’m pleased to allow you to know that you can now install my woorkup theme in your GeneratePress website with just a single click! It is called the Marketer theme. Get started with a great blog layout instantly.

brianjackson.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

I also Moved within my personal site, brianjackson.io, to GeneratePress. Previously I had been using a motif from Array Themes. It’s a fairly basic minimal site, as I don’t use it to get much. As you can see it loaded pretty fast.

brianjackson.io New GeneratePress Theme

I had been Able to duplicate the entire look 100% in GeneratePress in under one hour. And as you can see it loads faster! Amazing. I was even able to get rid of a few plugins that weren’t needed because of GP.

forgemedia.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

I also Moved over our organization website, forgemedia.io, to GeneratePress. Previously I had been using a motif from Array Themes. It’s a pretty basic minimum website, as we simply use it to our LLC. Since you can see it already loaded pretty fast. Nice WordPress Themes

forgemedia.io New GeneratePress Theme

I had been Able to again move everything over and get it looking exactly how I needed 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 total page burden 2x!

I can’t express my Excitement about locating GeneratePress and I am moving over all my sites to it (which includes some EDD e-commerce websites ). Once I’ve got my 9 sites all running in GP with no child topics, my entire life is going to be a breeze! The programmer has revived my faith in multi-purpose themes, and that when done the correct way, can actually perform quicker.

And The best news isI finally have a thousand more options to pick from than I did before.

What GeneratePress Is Great For…

GeneratePress Is the perfect option for performance-focused users who want to be able to customize and control precisely how their site looks.

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

Since Of that, people who assemble WordPress sites for a living love GeneratePress. They will 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 Want something that will immediately look perfect out of the box.

For Example, if you know you wish to create a fashion blog, you may be happier picking out a market theme that’s developed exclusively for trend bloggers.

Even though GeneratePress is becoming a lot easier to use, as a result of its pre-built Website Library, GeneratePress still looks very barebones if you initially install it.

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

GeneratePress Features That Make It Unique

Here Are some of the specific characteristics that explain why GeneratePress is so common.

Plenty Of Customization Options In The Real-Time WordPress Customizer

Beyond Functionality, another area where GeneratePress does well is its customization options.

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

The Free version of GeneratePress provides you adequate options, but if you own GeneratePress Premium, you will be able to customize pretty much all about your website.

For Example, if you go in the Design area, you may configure detailed settings to your:

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

Likewise, That the Typography area enables you to control the font for each and every element on your website, including buttons:

And You also receive a detailed area to control the colour of each and every element on your website.

All In all, GeneratePress will give you a lot more customization choices from the WordPress Customizer compared to most other themes. This level of detail might be a little overwhelming if you’re a beginner. But as soon as you understand the way the settings come together, you will have full control on how your website appears.

Optimized Performance And Fast Page Load Times

Across All its features, GeneratePress consistently includes a focus on excellent performance and tidy code. The entire motif is less than 30 kB, which will be 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 some poorly coded topics can even exceed 1 MB!

GeneratePress Also has no code dependencies, which will help you avoid the render obstructing error that Google Pagespeed Insights often cites.

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

First, I put up an empty website utilizing a random popular WordPress.org theme (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 asks

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

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

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

If You do that same test with other topics, you are going to continue to see that GeneratePress is one of those fastest-loading WordPress themes in existence. Nice WordPress Themes

Other Helpful Premium Extensions, Plus Much Modular Approach

Past Giving you more style controls from the WordPress Customizer, GeneratePress Premium also comes with a lot of other useful features such as:

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

To Stay lightweight, GeneratePress also provides you a modular port where you could pick and choose exactly which features you want to activate.

That Way, you don’t have to slow your site down for a quality which you’ll never use.

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

In The last, you had to construct GeneratePress websites from a blank canvas no matter what, which left the motif difficult for casual users to install.

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

You Can import them right from the WordPress dashboard.

Yes this Website still uses GeneratePress! All I did was click on a couple buttons to import a presentation site.

Page-Level Settings Give You Detailed Control Over Every Piece Of Content

With Most topics, every page and post will use the same settings for the most part. You might 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 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 (such as changing the sidebar from right to left)
• Choose how many footer widgets to utilize
• Disable certain elements, such as your header, navigation menu, post featured picture, post title, or footer
• Produce a special”container” to your own page builder

Where These controls would be the most helpful is if you are using a WordPress page builder.

By Disabling certain components, you are able to create the correct baseline for your page builder layout, making it effortless to create custom content as needed. Nice WordPress Themes

GeneratePress Pricing: Cheap And Works On Unlimited Sites

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

That said, If you are seriously interested in utilizing GeneratePress, I believe you should purchase the GeneratePress Premium plugin, as that is what produces 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 affordable. It costs just $39.95, which gives you use on infinite websites . You will also get a 40% discount if you want to renew to continue receiving support and upgrades following the initial year (you can, obviously, continue using GeneratePress after the first year without renewing — you won’t get any more updates).

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

Wrap-up

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

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

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

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

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

To Get started, Click here to download GeneratePress.