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Within the past ten years, I have used a lot of different WordPress topics and have been really disappointed. Up until recently, I had been utilizing MyThemeShop, which was pretty good. But I still had to do a great deal of customization to allow it to do and operate the way I needed it to. A couple of weeks ago I decided to give GeneratePress a try, and let me just say, it is undoubtedly the best WordPress theme I’ve discovered in a decade . I had been dismissed and am now moving all of my websites to GeneratePress. I’ll go into precisely why in my in-depth GeneratePress review under. And if you’re wondering, yes I have tried Genesis, Astra, OceanWP, Avada, X theme, Divi in addition to several other lightweight and heavier multicolored themes. Security WordPress Theme Free

To Begin, Click here to download GeneratePress.

GeneratePress Review

GeneratePress is a free WordPress theme made by Tom Usborne, a programmer from Canada. I have actually seen it for many years from the WordPress repository. Most of you know that I am fairly picky when it comes to web performance, and so I tend to ignore everything in the repository. Typically because a great deal of things on there isn’t that great, or not supported for long. Nonetheless, in this circumstance, that was a mistake. The motif currently has over half a million downloads, 80,000+ busy installs, with over 500 5-star ratings. So clearly Tom is doing some thing right here.

I Actually set up the free version of the motif and in a matter of 15 minutes purchased the superior 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 will go into that more below, but let us first look at some of the features. I’m going to be covering the premium edition of the subject, because it’s worth very penny. In fact, Tom, if you ever read this and are visiting Scottsdale, Arizona, java on me.

Characteristics

Super lightweight and quick. Modular design allowing you to enable/disable items you do not want running. This is only one of the greatest reasons I adore GeneratePress.

Responsive, looks fantastic across all devices.

Schema built-in, for better outcomes in SERPs.

Impressive integration with the WordPress Customizer. I have not been a lover of this 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.

Additionally, it works great with all the popular 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 had success.

Translation ready.

Font wonderful built in.

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

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

The Documentation can be incredible. Besides have good documentation on their site, the subject has existed long enough that everything I Googled throughout the setup procedure was found within a couple of seconds in their forum.

Going Deep Into GeneratePress

Now it’s Time to the fun part! I always test a brand new theme right from the box with no customizations to just see how fast the foundation is. This tells me a lot of what I could expect by the time that I add everything to it. Running the inventory GeneratePress WordPress theme 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 generate a whole lot of big files, but this is not the situation. You may tell that Tom actually worked hard on ensuring that every file loaded in GeneratePress is as small as possible. Together with HTTP/2, the number of files isn’t as important. But the dimensions is! Have a peek at some of the core 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 performance! And I have Seen the same throughout each the premium add-ons. They are literally as small as you can possibly get them. In fact, Font Awesome is most likely the largest file contained. And that isn’t even his. With Font Awesome 5 arriving around the corner, we could expect this to get smaller also.

The premium add-ons Are setup in what I would call a modular layout. You can activate/deactivate anything you are not using to guarantee they don’t load on your website. Since the co-developer of this perfmatters plugin that has a script manager 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

Hooks

Page Header

Spacing

Typography

No Child Theme Needed

One of The best features of GeneratePress is I no longer need to use a young child theme. This makes my life much simpler. No longer editing my functions.php or header.php documents. I will literally upgrade my GeneratePress theme this very moment rather than lose a single customization. The hooks add-on definitely can help make it possible. It permits you to add custom code/PHP everywhere throughout your WordPress website. Security WordPress Theme Free

Other Things I Love About GeneratePress

On each Page/post that you have a lot of options. You are able to change the sidebar design and the footer widgets.

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

The WordPress customizer choices is really where GeneratePress really shines! Bear in mind, a lot of these choices are permitted from the premium add-ons. I can’t show you everything, otherwise, we would 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 can be made by the exact same developer as GeneratePress. It allows you a super simple way to incorporate responsive columns into any page or article. Features include:

Desktop grid thickness

Tablet grid width

Mobile grid thickness

Insert Customized classes

Insert custom inline styles

Equal height columns

This is An example below:

You might want to Also catch his incredible WP Show Posts plugin also. See my featured articles on the sidebar of this site? That is using the WP Show Posts plugin. I have it set to show posts from a particular”featured” category. You can also have it show past 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 Sections add-on in the premium version of GeneratePress allows you to do all kinds of things concerning design. Think of it like a page builder with no bloat. GeneratePress is definitely not just for blogs! I’m in fact using GeneratePress for our ecommerce website (perfmatters.io) which is running Easy Digital Downloads. Feel free to check it out. However, as you can see below, it looks nothing like a site.

Speed Tests

For those Of you who are regular readers, you probably did not even notice that I changed the entire theme that powers woorkup.com. It only took me about an hour to get GeneratePress to mimic my MyThemeShop theme which I had spent annually customizing. Here is a comparison below.

woorkup.com Old MyThemeShop Theme

My old MyThemeShop theme was already pretty fast, but I spent a lot of time customizing it. In reality, I’ve gotten a lot 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

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 awesome GP hooks and snippets plugin (both CSS and PHP).

Like the WordPress theme I have running on woorkup? You are in luck. Tom asked if he could create a replica of woorkup for the new GeneratePress site library. I am happy to allow you to know that now you can install my woorkup motif in your own GeneratePress site with just a click! It is called the Marketer motif. Get started using a great blog layout immediately.

brianjackson.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

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

brianjackson.io New GeneratePress Theme

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

forgemedia.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

Additionally, I Moved over our organization website, forgemedia.io, to GeneratePress. Previously I had been using a motif from Array Themes. It is a fairly basic minimal site, as we just use it for our LLC. Since you can see it already loaded pretty quickly. Security WordPress Theme Free

forgemedia.io New GeneratePress Theme

I had been Able to move everything over and get it looking just how I wanted it in under one hour. And as you can view it loads faster! Amazing. I managed to get rid of a total of four plugins and it dropped my whole page weight 2x!

I can not express my Excitement about finding GeneratePress and I am moving over all of my websites to it (which comprises several EDD e-commerce sites). Once I’ve got my 9 websites all running in GP without any child themes, my life is going to 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 now have a billion more choices to choose from than I did before.

What GeneratePress Is Great For…

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

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

Because 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.

However GeneratePress Might Not Be A Good Fit If…

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

For Example, if you realize you want to create a style blog, you may be happier picking out a niche theme that is developed exclusively for trend bloggers.

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

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

GeneratePress Features That Make It Unique

Here Are a few of the particular characteristics that clarify why GeneratePress is indeed common.

Plenty Of Customization Options In The Real-Time WordPress Customizer

Past Functionality, another place where GeneratePress does well is its customization options.

GeneratePress Uses the WordPress Customizer for customization, and this is convenient as you will have the ability to see all of the changes that you make in real time.

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

For Example, if you go into the Layout area, you may configure detailed settings for yourown:

Header — you can move your header around and change its styling
Navigation — GeneratePress gives you two different navigation options, such as sticky menus
Sidebar design — you can use a Couple of sidebars
Blog post design — such as featured picture size, metadata, etc..
Footer layout — like how many widgets to include

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

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

All Whatsoever, GeneratePress will give you much more customization choices in the WordPress Customizer compared to most other themes. This amount of detail might be a little overwhelming if you are a beginner. But as soon as you understand how the preferences come together, you will have full control on how your website looks.

Optimized Performance And Fast Page Load Times

Around All its features, GeneratePress consistently includes a focus on excellent performance and tidy code. The whole theme is less than 30 kB, which is about as small as you are ever going to find for a WordPress theme. Even most other optimized WordPress topics are still 200+ kB. And a few badly coded topics can even surpass 1 MB!

GeneratePress Also does not have any code dependencies, which helps you avoid the render blocking error that Google Pagespeed Insights often mentions.

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

First, I put up a vacant website utilizing a haphazard popular WordPress.org theme (Envo Magazine). After analyzing its performance with Pingdom, it:

Had a performance tier of 77
Loaded in 1.05 seconds
Had a page size of 243.9 kB
Had 15 asks

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

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

Had a performance tier 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 do that same test with different topics, you are going to continue to find that GeneratePress is among those fastest-loading WordPress topics in existence. Security WordPress Theme Free

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 customized hooks, page headers, or layout templates.
Page Header — lets you create a unique page header onto a per-page basis.
Sections — that is kind of like lightweight page building. It permits you to create different”sections” onto a webpage, each with their own layout and column settings.

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

That Way, you don’t have to slow your site down for a feature that you’re never going to use.

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

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

Earlier In 2018, though, the developer added a fresh Site Library attribute for GeneratePress Premium users that lets you easily import any one of the 25+ pre-built demo sites.

You Can import them directly from the WordPress dashboard.

Yes — this site still uses GeneratePress! All I did was click a couple buttons to import a demo site.

Page-Level Settings Give You Comprehensive Control Over Each Piece Of Content

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

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

You Can utilize this meta box to:

Change the number of sidebars your website uses, or the sidebar orientation (such as changing the sidebar from right to left)
Choose the number of footer widgets to use
Disable certain elements, such as your header, navigation menu, post featured image, article title, or footer
Produce a special”container” to your own page builder

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

By Disabling certain elements, you are in a position to produce the correct baseline for your page builder design, which makes it effortless to create custom content as needed. Security WordPress Theme Free

GeneratePress Replies: Affordable And Works On Unlimited Sites

The Core GeneratePress theme is available at no cost at WordPress.org.

Nevertheless, If you’re serious about using GeneratePress, I believe you need to buy the GeneratePress Premium plugin, as that is what makes the theme so flexible. The free version does not give you nearly as many configurations from the WordPress Customizer. And you will also lose out on the premade Site Library.

GeneratePress Premium is also still quite affordable. It costs only $39.95, and that gives you use on infinite sites. You will also get a 40% discount if you would like to renew to continue receiving support and upgrades following the first year (you can, obviously, keep using GeneratePress after the initial year without beating — 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.

Wrap-up

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 needs for your market out of day one.

However, If you are ready to spend time altering settings, GeneratePress’ mode controls give you the flexibility to flip it into any sort of WordPress website. Or, you may even be able to locate a starter website that fulfills your needs to save a little time.

Additionally, It’s one of the fastest-loading WordPress topics you will locate. So if you’re seeking the best performance possible, using GeneratePress as your WordPress site’s foundation is a good decision.

If You blend it with fast-loading hosting, you shouldn’t have any problem making your site load in under one minute. Security WordPress Theme Free