Introduction Template Generator For WordPress

Within the previous ten decades, I’ve used a great deal of different WordPress themes and have been very disappointed. Up till recently, I had been using MyThemeShop, which was fairly excellent. However, I had to perform a great deal of customization to allow it to do and operate how I needed it to. A few weeks ago I decided to give GeneratePress a try, and let me just say, it is by far the best WordPress theme I’ve found in a decade . I was blown away and am moving all my sites to GeneratePress. I will enter precisely why in my in-depth GeneratePress review below. And if you are wondering, yes I’ve tried Genesis, Astra, OceanWP, Avada, X theme, Divi as well as several other lightweight and thicker multicolored themes. Template Generator For WordPress

To Begin, Click here to download GeneratePress.

GeneratePress Review

GeneratePress is a free WordPress theme created by Tom Usborne, a programmer from Canada. I have actually seen it for many years from the WordPress repository. Most of you realize 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 things on there is not that great, or not supported for long. However, in this case, this was a mistake. The theme currently has more than half a million downloads, 80,000+ active installs, with over 500 5-star ratings. So obviously Tom is doing something right here.

I Actually installed the free version of the theme and in a matter of 15 minutes bought the premium version. I could tell right off the bat, the programmer was thinking precisely how I was imagining a theme should work. And I will go into that more below, but let us first look at some of the qualities. I’m going to be covering the superior edition of the theme, because it’s worth . Actually, Tom, if you read this and so are visiting Scottsdale, Arizona, coffees on me.

Features

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

Responsive, looks great across all of the devices.

Schema built-in, for better results in SERPs.

Impressive integration with all the WordPress Customizer. I haven’t been a fan of this customizer in the past, but Tom does it correctly.

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

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

Resumes prepared.

Font wonderful built-in.

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

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

The Documentation is also unbelievable. Besides have good documentation on their site, the subject has existed long enough that everything I Googled throughout the setup process was found inside a few seconds from their own forum.

Diving Into GeneratePress

Now it is Time to the fun part! I always test a new theme right from the box without any customizations to just see how quickly the base is. This tells me a lot of what I can expect by the time 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 worried about with GeneratePress was that the modular layout was going to produce a whole lot of big files, but this is not the situation. You may tell that Tom literally worked hard on ensuring that every record loaded in GeneratePress is as little as possible. Together with HTTP/2, the amount of documents isn’t as important. However, the size is! Take a look 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 developer that cares about functionality! And I’ve Seen the same during all of the premium add-ons. They are literally as small as you can possibly get them. In reality, Font Awesome is probably the biggest file included. And that isn’t even his. Together with Font Awesome 5 coming around the corner, we could anticipate this to get smaller also.

The premium add-ons Are installation in what I’d call a modular layout. You can activate/deactivate whatever you aren’t using to guarantee they don’t load on your website. As the co-developer of this perfmatters plugin which has a script manager built, I felt at home for this. Everything should be made this way.

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

Blog

Shades

Hooks

Page Header

Spacing

Typography

No Child Theme Needed

One of The best characteristics of GeneratePress is that I no longer have to use a young child motif . This makes my life so much simpler. No longer editing my functions.php or header.php documents. I will literally update my GeneratePress motif this exact minute rather than shed a single customization. The hooks add-on definitely can help make this possible. It allows you to incorporate custom code/PHP anywhere throughout your WordPress site. Template Generator For WordPress

Other Things I Love About GeneratePress

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

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

The WordPress customizer choices is where GeneratePress really shines! Bear in mind, a lot of these options are enabled by the premium add-ons. I can not show you everything, otherwise, we’d be here all day. But let me show you couple which really 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 developer as GeneratePress. It allows you a super easy way to add responsive columns to any page or article. Characteristics include:

Desktop grid thickness

Tablet grid width

Mobile grid width

Add custom classes

Add custom inline designs

Equal height columns

Here is An example below:

You might want to Also grab his incredible WP Display Posts plugin too. See 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 specific”featured” category. You can also have it show last modified/updated articles, recent posts, etc.. I am using the free version and it works great.

To Get started, Click here to download GeneratePress.

Sections Add-on

The Segments add-in in the premium edition of GeneratePress allows you to do all kinds of things concerning design. Think of it like a page builder with no bloat. GeneratePress is certainly not only for blogs! I am in reality using GeneratePress to our ecommerce website (perfmatters.io) which is running Easy Digital Downloads. Feel free to check it out. But as you can see below, it looks nothing like a blog.

Speed Tests

For those Of those who are regular readers, you likely did not even notice that I changed the whole motif that forces woorkup.com. It just 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 motif was already pretty quickly, but I invested a lot of time customizing it. In fact, I have gotten a lot of emails from you guys asking me to publish all of my customizations. My advice now is, simply get GeneratePress!

woorkup.com New GeneratePress Theme

With the New GeneratePress motif I managed to achieve faster speeds and 600 fewer lines of code! And remember, I don’t have a child motif. 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’re in luck. Tom asked if he could create a replica of woorkup to your new GeneratePress site library. I am pleased to let you know that you can now install my woorkup motif in your own GeneratePress site with just a click! It’s known as the Marketer motif. Get started with 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 motif from Array Themes. It is a fairly basic minimal site, since I do not use it for much. As you can see it already loaded pretty quickly.

brianjackson.io New GeneratePress Theme

I was Able to replicate 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 few plugins that weren’t needed due to 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 site, as we simply use it for our LLC. Since you can see it loaded pretty fast. Template Generator For WordPress

forgemedia.io New GeneratePress Theme

I had been Able to move everything over and get it looking just how I needed it in under an hour. And since you can see it loads faster! Amazing. I was able to eliminate a total of four plugins and it dropped my total page burden 2x!

I can’t express my Excitement about locating GeneratePress and I’m moving over all my sites to it (which includes some EDD e-commerce sites). Once I have my 9 websites all running in GP without any child topics, my entire life will be a breeze! The programmer has revived my faith in multi-purpose themes, which when done the right way, can actually perform faster.

And The best thing is, I finally have a thousand more options to pick from than I did before.

What GeneratePress Is Great For…

GeneratePress Is the ideal option for performance-focused users that wish to be able to customize and control exactly how their site looks.

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

Since Of that, those who assemble WordPress websites for a living love GeneratePress. They’ll normally pair it with a WordPress site builder and use it for literally any kind of site.

But GeneratePress Might Not Be A Fantastic Combination If…

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

For Example, if you know you want to produce a style blog, you may be happier choosing a niche theme that is 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 first install it.

So To create GeneratePress look how you would like it to, you’ll most likely will need to go in and personalize things. 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 That Make It Unique

Here Are a few of the particular features that explain why GeneratePress is so common.

Plenty Of Customization Options From The Real-Time WordPress Customizer

Past Performance, another area where GeneratePress does well is its customization options.

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

The Free version of GeneratePress gives you decent possibilities, but if you own GeneratePress Premium, you’ll be able to customize nearly everything about your website.

For Example, if you go in the Layout area, you may configure comprehensive settings to yourown:

Header — you can move your header round and change its styling
Navigation — GeneratePress gives you two different navigation options, including sticky menus
Sidebar layout — you can use one or two sidebars
Blog post design — such as 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 site, such as buttons:

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

All Whatsoever, GeneratePress will provide you much more customization choices from the WordPress Customizer compared to most other topics. This amount of detail may be a bit overwhelming if you are a beginner. But as soon as you understand the way the settings come together, you will have full control over how your website appears.

Optimized Performance And Quick Page Load Times

Around All of its attributes, GeneratePress always includes a focus on exceptional performance and tidy code. The entire theme is less than 30 kB, which is about as little as you’ll ever find for a WordPress theme. Even most other optimized WordPress themes are still 200+ kB. And a few poorly coded themes can even exceed 1 MB!

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

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

First, I set up a vacant site utilizing 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 requests

That is Not bad in any way! But GeneratePress can perform.

Next, I activated GeneratePress on exactly the same test site without altering anything else. Here’s how GeneratePress failed:

Had a performance grade of 87, 10 points better
Loaded in 666 ms, ~37% quicker
Had a page size of 26.8 kB, ~90% smaller
Had 9 requests, ~40% less

If You do that same test with other topics, you are going to continue to find that GeneratePress is among the fastest-loading WordPress topics in life. Template Generator For WordPress

Other Useful Premium Extensions, Plus Much Modular Approach

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

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

To Stay lightweight, GeneratePress also gives you a modular port where you can pick and choose what characteristics you would like to activate.

That Way, you do not need to slow down your site for a feature that you’re never going to use.

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

In The last, you needed 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 programmer added a new Site Library feature for GeneratePress Premium users that lets you easily import any one of the 25+ pre-built demonstration websites .

You Can import them right from your WordPress dashboard.

Yes — this site 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 Bit Of Content

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

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

You Can use 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 use
Disable certain components, such as your header, navigation menu, post featured picture, article title, or footer
Create a special”container” to your page builder

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

By Disabling certain elements, you are in a position to produce the correct baseline for your own page builder layout, making it effortless to create custom content as needed. Template Generator For WordPress

GeneratePress Replies: Affordable And Works On Unlimited Sites

The Core GeneratePress theme is available for free at WordPress.org.

Nevertheless, If you’re serious about using GeneratePress, I believe you need to purchase the GeneratePress Premium plugin, as that’s what makes the theme so flexible. The free version does not give you almost as numerous settings in the WordPress Customizer. And you’ll also miss out on the premade Site Library.

GeneratePress Premium can be still quite reasonably priced. It costs only $39.95, and that provides you use on infinite websites . You will also get a 40% discount if you would like to renew to continue receiving support and updates following the first year (you can, obviously, keep using GeneratePress after the initial year without beating — you won’t receive any more upgrades ).

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

Summary

As I said, I don’t think GeneratePress is for everyone.

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

But If you’re willing to spend time altering settings, GeneratePress’ style controls give you the flexibility to flip it into any type 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 you will find. Therefore, if you’re looking for the best performance possible, utilizing GeneratePress as your WordPress site’s foundation is a great decision.

If You blend it with fast-loading hosting, you shouldn’t have any difficulty making your website load in under one second. Template Generator For WordPress