Introduction WordPress Church Themes

Over the past ten decades, I have used a great deal of different WordPress topics and have been really disappointed. Up till recently, I was utilizing MyThemeShop, that was fairly excellent. But I still had to do a great deal of customization to allow it to perform and operate how I wanted it to. A few weeks ago I decided to give GeneratePress a try, and let me just say, it’s by far the best WordPress theme I’ve discovered in a decade . I was blown away and am now moving all of my websites to GeneratePress. I will enter exactly why in my in-depth GeneratePress review under. And if you’re wondering, yes I’ve tried Genesis, Astra, OceanWP, Avada, X motif, Divi as well as many other lightweight and heavier multicolored themes. WordPress Church Themes

To Get started, Click here to download GeneratePress.

GeneratePress Evaluation

GeneratePress is a totally free WordPress theme created by Tom Usborne, a programmer from Canada. I’ve actually seen it for years from the WordPress repository. Most of you realize that I am pretty picky when it comes to web performance, and so I tend to dismiss everything in the repository. Typically because a great deal of stuff on there is not that good, or not supported for long. However, in this circumstance, that was a mistake. The motif now has over half a million downloads, 80,000+ active installs, with over 500 5-star ratings. So obviously Tom is doing something right here.

I Really installed 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 envisioning a theme should get the job done. And I’ll 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 theme, because it’s worth very penny. Actually, Tom, if you ever read this and are visiting Scottsdale, Arizona, java on me.

Features

Super lightweight and quick. Modular design allowing you to enable/disable items you don’t need running. This is one of the biggest reasons I love GeneratePress.

Responsive, looks fantastic across all devices.

Schema built-in, for better results in SERPs.

Dramatic integration using all the WordPress Customizer. I have not been a fan of this customizer in the past, but Tom does it right.

Compatible with all popular plugins, Yoast SEO, WooCommerce, EDD, BuddyPress, bbPress, and WPML. Fantastic 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 terrific combo. I have also read that individuals using Beaver Builder have experienced success.

Resumes prepared.

Font wonderful built in.

A lot of hooks and filters which make it great for developers.

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

The Documentation can be unbelievable. Besides have great documentation on their website, the theme has existed long enough that what I wholeheartedly during the setup process was found inside a few seconds from their forum.

Going Deep Into GeneratePress

Now it’s Time for the fun part! I test a new theme right from the box with no customizations to just see how quickly the foundation is. This tells me a lot of what I can expect by the time that 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 design was going to produce a whole lot of big files, but this is not the situation. You can tell that Tom actually worked hard on making sure every file packed in GeneratePress is as little as possible. With HTTP/2, the number of files is not as important. However, the size is! Take a look at some 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

This is a programmer that cares about functionality! And I have Seen the same throughout each of the premium add-ons. They’re literally as small as possible get them. In fact, Font Awesome is probably the biggest file contained. And that is not even his. With Font Awesome 5 coming round the cornerwe can expect this to get smaller too.

The premium add-ons Are setup in what I’d call a modular layout. You can activate/deactivate anything you are not using to ensure they don’t load on your website. As the co-developer of the 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 interested, I am using the following add-ons on this site:

Blog

Shades

Hooks

Page Header

Spacing

Typography

No Child Theme Needed

One of The best features of GeneratePress is that I no longer have to use a young child theme. This makes my life much simpler. No more editing my functions.php or header.php files. I can literally upgrade my GeneratePress theme this exact moment and not lose one customization. The hooks add-on certainly can help make this possible. It permits you to add custom code/PHP everywhere throughout your WordPress website. WordPress Church Themes

Other Things I Love About GeneratePress

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

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

The WordPress customizer options is where GeneratePress really shines! Bear in mind, lots of these choices are permitted from the superior add-ons. I can not show you everything, otherwise, we’d be here all day. However, let me show you few 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 exact same programmer as GeneratePress. It enables you a super easy way to incorporate responsive columns to any page or post. Features include:

Desktop grid thickness

Tablet grid width

Mobile grid thickness

Insert Customized courses

Insert custom inline styles

Equal height columns

This is An example below:

You May Want to Also catch his amazing WP Show Posts plugin also. View my featured posts on the sidebar of this website? That’s using the WP Show Posts plugin. I have it set to show posts from a specific”featured” category. You might also get it show last modified/updated articles, recent posts, etc.. I am 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 edition of GeneratePress lets you perform all sorts of things concerning design. Consider it like a webpage builder without the bloat. GeneratePress is definitely not only for blogs! I am in fact using GeneratePress for our ecommerce site (perfmatters.io) that is operating Easy Digital Downloads. Feel free to check it out. But as you can see below, it looks like a site.

Speed Tests

For all those Of those that are regular readers, you likely didn’t even notice that I changed the whole motif that powers woorkup.com. It only took me about an hour for GeneratePress to mimic my MyThemeShop theme that I had spent a year customizing. Here’s a comparison under.

woorkup.com Old MyThemeShop Theme

My old MyThemeShop theme was already pretty quickly, 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 today is, just get GeneratePress!

woorkup.com New GeneratePress Theme

With the New GeneratePress motif I was able to attain faster speeds and 600 fewer lines of code! And keep in mind, I don’t have a kid motif. All the customizations were made using the wonderful 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 new GeneratePress site library. I’m happy to let you know that now you can put in my woorkup theme on your GeneratePress site with just a click! It’s known as the Marketer motif. Get started using a fantastic blog layout instantly.

brianjackson.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

I also Moved over my personal site, brianjackson.io, to GeneratePress. Previously I had been using a motif from Array Themes. It is a fairly basic minimum site, since I don’t use it for much. Since you can see it loaded pretty fast.

brianjackson.io New GeneratePress Theme

I had been Able to duplicate the whole look 100% in GeneratePress in under one hour. And since you can view it loads even faster! Amazing. I was able to eliminate 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 theme from Array Themes. It’s a fairly basic minimal website, as we just use it for our LLC. Since you can see it loaded pretty fast. WordPress Church Themes

forgemedia.io New GeneratePress Theme

I had been Able to again move everything over and get it looking just how I needed it in under an hour. And as you can see it loads faster! Amazing. I was able to eliminate a total of four plugins and it dropped my whole page burden 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’ve got my 9 sites all running in GP without any child themes, my entire life is going to be a breeze! The developer has restored my faith in multi-purpose subjects , which when done the correct way, can actually perform faster.

And The best thing isI finally have a billion more choices to pick from than I did earlier.

What GeneratePress Is Good For…

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

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

Since Of that, those who build WordPress sites for a living love GeneratePress. They will typically pair it with a WordPress site builder and use it for literally any type of site.

But GeneratePress Might Not Be A Fantastic Fit If…

…you Need something which will immediately appear 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’s developed exclusively for trend bloggers.

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

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

GeneratePress Features Which Make It Unique

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

Lots Of Customization Options From The Real-Time WordPress Customizer

Beyond Performance, another place where GeneratePress does well is its customization choices.

GeneratePress Utilizes the WordPress Customizer for customization, and this can be convenient as you will be able to see all of the changes that you make in real time.

The Free variant of GeneratePress gives you decent possibilities, but should you own GeneratePress Premium, you’ll be able to customize nearly all about your website.

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

Header — you can move your header round and alter its own styling
Navigation — GeneratePress gives you two different navigation options, such as sticky menus
Sidebar layout — you can utilize a Couple of sidebars
Blog post layout — like featured picture size, metadata, etc..
Footer layout — like the number of widgets to include

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

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

All Whatsoever, GeneratePress will provide you a lot more customization choices in the WordPress Customizer than most other themes. This level of detail may be a little overwhelming if you’re a newcomer. But once you realize how the preferences come together, you will have complete control on how your website looks.

Optimized Performance And Fast Page Load Times

Across All its attributes, GeneratePress always has a focus on exceptional performance and tidy code. The entire theme is less than 30 kB, and it will be 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 some badly coded topics can even surpass 1 MB!

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

Place That collectively, and you obtain a superfast-loading theme. How fast? To give you a sense, I conducted a little test.

First, I put up a vacant site utilizing a random popular WordPress.org theme (Envo Magazine). After analyzing 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 activated GeneratePress on the same test site without changing anything else. Here is how GeneratePress failed:

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

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

Other Helpful Premium Extensions, Plus A Modular Approach

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

Elements — a exceptional feature which lets you create customized hooks, page headers, or layout 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 lets you create separate”sections” onto a page, each with their own layout and column preferences.

To Remain lightweight, GeneratePress also gives you a modular interface where you could pick and choose exactly which characteristics you would like to trigger.

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

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

In The last, you needed to build GeneratePress sites from a blank canvas no matter what, which left the theme difficult for casual users to set up.

Earlier In 2018, however, the developer added a fresh Website Library feature for GeneratePress Premium users which allows you easily import any among 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 on a few buttons to import a demo site.

Page-Level Settings Provide You Comprehensive Control Over Every Piece Of Content

With Most themes, every post and page will use the very same settings for the most part. You may have some custom formats or templates — however you don’t have very much control beyond 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 site uses, or the sidebar orientation (such as altering the sidebar from right to left)
Choose the number of footer widgets to use
Disable certain components, like 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 site builder.

By Disabling certain components, you are able to produce the proper baseline for your own page builder design, which makes it easy to create custom content as needed. WordPress Church Themes

GeneratePress Pricing: Cheap And Works On Unlimited Sites

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

That said, If you are seriously interested in using GeneratePress, I believe you should purchase the GeneratePress Premium plugin, as that’s what produces the theme so elastic. The free version doesn’t give you nearly as many settings from the WordPress Customizer. And you’ll also lose out on the premade Site Library.

GeneratePress Premium can be still quite affordable. It costs just $39.95, and that provides you use on unlimited websites . You will also get a 40% discount if you would like to renew to keep on receiving support and updates following the initial year (you can, of course, continue using GeneratePress after the initial 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 great value.

Conclusion

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

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

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

Additionally, It is one of the fastest-loading WordPress themes that you will find. Therefore, if you’re looking for the best performance possible, utilizing GeneratePress as your WordPress site’s base is a good decision.

If You blend it with fast-loading hosting, so you should have no problem making your site load in under one minute. WordPress Church Themes