Background WordPress Blog Templates

Within the previous ten years, I have used a lot of different WordPress themes and have been very disappointed. Up until recently, I had been utilizing MyThemeShop, that was pretty good. However, I still had to do a great deal of customization to allow it to perform and work how I needed it to. A couple of weeks ago I decided to provide GeneratePress a try, and let me just say, it is undoubtedly the finest WordPress theme I have found in a decade . I had been dismissed and am now moving all my sites 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 as well as several other lightweight and heavier multicolored themes. WordPress Blog Templates

To Get started, Click here to download GeneratePress.

GeneratePress Review

GeneratePress is a totally free WordPress theme created by Tom Usborne, a programmer from Canada. I have actually seen it for years in 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 from the repository. Typically because a great deal of things on there isn’t that great, or not encouraged for long. However, in this case, this was a mistake. The motif now has more than half a million downloads, 80,000+ active matches, with over 500 5-star evaluations. So clearly Tom is doing some thing right here.

I Actually installed the free version of the motif and in a matter of 15 minutes bought the superior version. I could tell right off the bat, the programmer was thinking precisely how I was envisioning a theme should get the job done. 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 premium edition of the subject, since it’s worth . Actually, Tom, in the event that you ever read this and so are visiting Scottsdale, Arizona, java on me.

Characteristics

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

Responsive, looks great across all devices.

Schema built-in, for greater results in SERPs.

Dramatic integration with all the WordPress Customizer. I haven’t been a lover of this customizer in the past, 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 are a great combo. I’ve also read that people using Beaver Builder have had success.

Resumes prepared.

Font awesome built-in.

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

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

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

Going Deep Into GeneratePress

Now it is Time to the fun part! I always test a new theme right out of the box without any customizations to see how fast the base is. This tells me a great deal of what I can expect by the time I add everything to it. Running the inventory GeneratePress WordPress motif 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 generate a whole lot of big files, but that is not the case. You may tell that Tom actually worked hard on ensuring every file loaded in GeneratePress is as little as possible. With HTTP/2, the amount of files isn’t as significant. However, the size is! Have a look at some of the center 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 developer that cares about functionality! And I have Seen the same during each the premium add-ons. They’re literally as small as you can possibly get them. In fact, Font Awesome is probably the largest file contained. And that is not even his. Together with Font Awesome 5 coming around the cornerwe could anticipate this to secure smaller also.

The premium add-ons Are installation in what I’d call a modular layout. It is possible to activate/deactivate anything you are not using to ensure they don’t load on your website. Since the co-developer of the perfmatters plugin which has a script manager built, I felt right at home for this. Everything ought to be designed 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 features of GeneratePress is I no longer have to use a young child motif . This makes my life much simpler. No more editing my functions.php or header.php documents. I will literally update my GeneratePress theme this exact moment and not shed one customization. The hooks add-on definitely can help make this possible. It allows you to add custom code/PHP everywhere throughout your WordPress website. WordPress Blog Templates

Other Things I Love About GeneratePress

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

You Can quickly swap a page between the default option to a full width page, in addition to disable components.

The WordPress customizer choices is really where GeneratePress really shines! Bear in mind, lots of these choices are enabled by the superior add-ons. I can’t show you everything, otherwise, we’d be here daily. However, allow me to 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 created by precisely the exact same developer as GeneratePress. It allows you a super easy way to add responsive columns to any page or post. Characteristics include:

Desktop grid thickness

Tablet grid width

Mobile grid thickness

Insert custom classes

Add custom inline designs

Equal height columns

Here is An example under:

You might want to Also grab his incredible WP Display 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 get it show past modified/updated articles, recent posts, etc.. I’m using the free version and it works great.

To Begin, Click here to download GeneratePress.

Sections Add-on

The Segments add-in in the premium version of GeneratePress lets you do all sorts of things in terms of design. Consider it like a page builder with no bloat. GeneratePress is certainly not just for blogs! I am in reality utilizing GeneratePress to 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 those Of those that are regular readers, you likely did not even notice that I changed the entire theme that powers woorkup.com. It just took me about an hour to get GeneratePress to mimic my MyThemeShop theme that I had spent annually customizing. Here’s a comparison under.

woorkup.com Old MyThemeShop Theme

My older MyThemeShop motif was already pretty fast, but I invested a great deal of time customizing it. In fact, I’ve 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

With the New GeneratePress theme I was able to achieve faster speeds and 600 fewer lines of code! And keep in mind, I don’t have a kid theme. All the customizations were made using the wonderful GP hooks and snippets plugin (both CSS and PHP).

Like the WordPress theme I have running on woorkup? You’re in luck. Tom asked if he could make a copy of woorkup for the brand new GeneratePress blog library. I’m happy to allow you to know that now you can install my woorkup motif on your GeneratePress website with just a single click! It is known as the Marketer theme. Get started with a fantastic blog layout immediately.

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 pretty basic minimum site, as I do not use it for much. Since you can see it loaded pretty fast.

brianjackson.io New GeneratePress Theme

I was Able to duplicate the whole look 100% in GeneratePress in under one hour. And since you can view it loads faster! Amazing. I was 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 business site, forgemedia.io, to GeneratePress. Previously I had been using a motif from Array Themes. It is a fairly basic minimum website, as we just use it for our LLC. Since you can see it already loaded pretty fast. WordPress Blog Templates

forgemedia.io New GeneratePress Theme

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

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

And The best news isI now have a thousand more choices to pick from than I did earlier.

What GeneratePress Is Good For…

GeneratePress Is the perfect alternative for performance-focused users that want to be able 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 website that you build will have a fantastic base to make it load quickly.

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

But GeneratePress Might Not Be A Good Fit If…

…you Want something that will immediately look perfect from the box.

For Example, if you realize you wish to produce a style blog, you might be happier picking out a niche theme that is developed exclusively for fashion bloggers.

While GeneratePress has gotten a great deal simpler to use, thanks to its pre-built Site Library, GeneratePress still seems very barebones if you first install it.

So To make GeneratePress look how you want it to, you’ll almost certainly will need to go in and customize matters. And while the significant benefit of GeneratePress is how customizable it is, many users, particularly casual users, don’t like having to make those changes .

GeneratePress Features Which Make It Unique

Here Are some of the particular characteristics that explain why GeneratePress is so popular.

Plenty Of Customization Options From The Real-Time WordPress Customizer

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

GeneratePress Uses the WordPress Customizer for customization, which is convenient as you’ll be able to see all of the changes that you make in real time.

The Free variant of GeneratePress provides you decent options, but if you have GeneratePress Premium, you will have the ability to customize nearly everything about your website.

For Example, if you go into the Layout region, you may configure comprehensive settings to your:

Header — you can move your header round and change 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 layout — such as featured picture dimensions, metadata, etc..
Footer layout — just like how many widgets to add

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

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

All In all, GeneratePress will provide you a lot more customization options from the WordPress Customizer than most other topics. This level of detail may be a bit overwhelming if you are a beginner. But once you understand how the settings come together, you’ll have full control on how your website appears.

Optimized Performance And Fast Page Load Times

Around All its attributes, GeneratePress consistently includes a focus on excellent performance and tidy code. The entire theme is less than 30 kB, which is 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 badly coded themes can even exceed 1 MB!

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

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

First, I set up a vacant website using a haphazard popular WordPress.org theme (Envo Magazine). After testing its performance 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 site without changing anything else. Here’s how GeneratePress failed:

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 requests, ~40% fewer

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

Other Useful Premium Extensions, Plus A 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 that lets you create custom hooks, page headers, or design templates.
Page Header — allows you create a unique page header onto a per-page basis.
Sections — this is sort of like lightweight page building. It lets you create different”sections” on a webpage, each with their own design and column settings.

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

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

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

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

Earlier In 2018, however, the programmer added a fresh Site Library feature for GeneratePress Premium users that lets you easily import any among those 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 Provide You Detailed Control Over Every Bit Of Content

With Most topics, 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 providing you a brand new Layout meta box for every single post and page:

You Can use this meta box to:

Change the number of sidebars your site uses, or the sidebar orientation (like altering the sidebar from right to left)
Choose the number of footer widgets to use
Disable certain components, like your header, navigation menu, article featured picture, post title, or footer
Create a special”container” for your page builder

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

By Disabling certain components, you’re able to produce the proper baseline for your page builder design, which makes it effortless to create custom articles as needed. WordPress Blog Templates

GeneratePress Replies: Affordable And Works On Unlimited Sites

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

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

GeneratePress Premium can be still quite reasonably priced. It costs just $39.95, which provides you use on unlimited sites. You’ll also get a 40% discount if you want to renew to keep on receiving support and upgrades following the initial year (you can, obviously, continue using GeneratePress after the initial 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 desire a niche-specific theme, you can probably save time by purchasing a theme that fits your needs for your market from day one.

But If you are ready to spend time changing preferences, then GeneratePress’ style controls give you the flexibility to turn it into any sort of WordPress site. Or, you might even have the ability to locate a starter website that fulfills your needs to save some time.

Additionally, It is one of those fastest-loading WordPress themes you will locate. So if you’re looking for the best performance possible, utilizing GeneratePress as your WordPress site’s foundation is a great choice.

If You combine it with fast-loading hosting, so you should have no difficulty making your site load in under one second. WordPress Blog Templates