Background WordPress Design Help

Over the past 10 years, I’ve used a lot of different WordPress topics and have been very disappointed. Up till recently, I had been using MyThemeShop, that was fairly good. But I still had to do a great deal of customization to allow it to perform and operate how I needed it to. A few of weeks ago I decided to provide GeneratePress a try, and let me just say, it’s undoubtedly the best WordPress theme I’ve found in a decade . I was dismissed and am now moving all my sites to GeneratePress. I’ll enter precisely why in my comprehensive GeneratePress review below. And if you’re wondering, yes I’ve tried Genesis, Astra, OceanWP, Avada, X theme, Divi in addition to several other lightweight and heavier multicolored themes. WordPress Design Help

To Begin, Click here to download GeneratePress.

GeneratePress Review

GeneratePress is a totally free WordPress theme created by Tom Usborne, a programmer from Canada. I have really seen it for years from the WordPress repository. Most of you realize that I’m pretty picky when it comes to web performance, so I have a tendency 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 circumstance, this 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 Really set up the free version of the motif and in a matter of 15 minutes bought the premium version. I could tell right off the bat, the developer was thinking exactly how I was imagining a theme should work. And I’ll go into that more below, but let’s first look at some of the qualities. I will be covering the premium edition of the theme, because it’s worth . Actually, Tom, if you ever read this and so are seeing Scottsdale, Arizona, java on me.

Characteristics

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

Responsive, looks fantastic across all devices.

Schema built-in, for greater outcomes in SERPs.

Impressive integration with all the WordPress Customizer. I have not been a fan of this customizer previously, but Tom does it right.

Compatible with popular plugins, Yoast SEO, WooCommerce, EDD, BuddyPress, bbPress, and WPML. Great browser support 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 great combo. I have also read that people using Beaver Builder have had success.

Translation ready.

Font awesome built in.

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

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

The Documentation can be unbelievable. Besides have good documentation on their site, the subject has existed long enough that what I Googled throughout the setup procedure was found within a few seconds from their forum.

Going Deep Into GeneratePress

Now it is Time for the fun part! I always test a brand new theme right out of the box with no customizations to just see how quickly the base is. This tells me a great deal of what I can expect by the time I add everything for this. Running the inventory GeneratePress WordPress theme on Kinsta hosting clocked in at a whopping 265 ms load time. I was very impressed.

One Thing I was concerned about with GeneratePress was that the modular layout was going to produce a whole lot of big files, but that is not the case. You can tell that Tom actually worked hard on ensuring every record loaded in GeneratePress is as little as possible. Together with HTTP/2, the number of files is not as important. However, the dimensions 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 programmer that cares about performance! And I’ve 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 probably the largest file included. And that isn’t even his. Together with Font Awesome 5 arriving round the cornerwe could anticipate this to secure smaller also.

The premium add-ons Are setup in what I would call a modular design. It is possible to activate/deactivate whatever you aren’t using to guarantee they do not load on your website. As the co-developer of the perfmatters plugin which has a script supervisor built, I felt right at home with this. Everything should be designed this way.

If You are interested, I’m using the next add-ons on this website:

Blog

Shades

Hooks

Page Header

Spacing

Typography

No Child Theme Needed

One of The best features of GeneratePress is that I no longer need to use a Child theme. This makes my life so much simpler. No longer editing my functions.php or header.php documents. I can literally upgrade my GeneratePress theme this very moment and not shed a single customization. The hooks add-on definitely can help make it possible. It allows you to incorporate custom code/PHP anywhere throughout your WordPress website. WordPress Design Help

Other Things I Love About GeneratePress

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

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

The WordPress customizer options is where GeneratePress really shines! Bear in mind, a lot of these options are permitted from the superior add-ons. I can not show you everything, otherwise, we’d be here daily. However, allow me to show you couple 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 created by the same programmer as GeneratePress. It allows you a super simple way to incorporate responsive columns to any page or article. Features include:

Desktop grid width

Tablet grid thickness

Mobile grid width

Insert Customized courses

Add custom inline designs

Equal height columns

Here is An example under:

You might want to Also grab his amazing WP Show Posts plugin too. See my featured posts on the sidebar of this website? That’s using the WP Display Posts plugin. I have it set to show posts from a particular”featured” category. You can also get it show last modified/updated posts, recent posts, etc.. I’m using the free version and it works great.

To Get started, Click here to download GeneratePress.

Sections Add-on

The Sections add-on in the premium edition of GeneratePress allows you to perform all kinds 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 fact using GeneratePress to our ecommerce website (perfmatters.io) that is running Easy Digital Downloads. Feel free to check it out. However, as you can see below, it looks like a site.

Speed Tests

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

woorkup.com Old MyThemeShop Theme

My old MyThemeShop motif was pretty fast, but I spent a great deal of time customizing it. In fact, I have 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 theme I managed to achieve faster speeds and 600 fewer lines of code! And keep in mind, I do not 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 can make a copy of woorkup for the new GeneratePress site library. I’m pleased to allow you to know that you can now put in my woorkup theme on your GeneratePress site with just a click! It’s called the Marketer motif. Get started using a great blog design instantly.

brianjackson.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

Additionally, I Moved over my personal website, brianjackson.io, to GeneratePress. Previously I had been using a theme from Array Themes. It’s a fairly basic minimum website, since I don’t use it to get much. Since you can see it already loaded pretty quickly.

brianjackson.io New GeneratePress Theme

I was Able to replicate the whole look 100 percent in GeneratePress in under one hour. And since you can see it loads faster! Amazing. I was able to get rid of a couple plugins which weren’t needed due to GP.

forgemedia.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

I also Moved over our organization site, forgemedia.io, to GeneratePress. Previously I had been using a theme from Array Themes. It is a pretty basic minimum site, as we just use it to our LLC. As you can see it already loaded pretty fast. WordPress Design Help

forgemedia.io New GeneratePress Theme

I was Able to again move everything over and get it looking exactly 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 finding GeneratePress and I am moving over all my websites to it (which comprises several EDD e-commerce sites). After I have my 9 websites all running in GP without any child topics, 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 thing isI finally have a thousand more options to choose from than I did earlier.

What GeneratePress Is Great For…

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

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

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

However GeneratePress Might Not Be A Fantastic Fit If…

…you Want something which will immediately appear perfect out of the box.

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

Even though GeneratePress is becoming a great deal easier to use, as a result of its pre-built Site Library, GeneratePress still looks very barebones if you first install it.

So To create GeneratePress look how you would like it to, you will most likely need to go in and customize matters. And though the significant advantage 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 some of the particular characteristics that explain why GeneratePress is so common.

Plenty Of Customization Options From The Real-Time WordPress Customizer

Beyond Performance, another area where GeneratePress does nicely is its customization options.

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

The Free version of GeneratePress provides you decent possibilities, but should you own GeneratePress Premium, you’ll be able to customize nearly all about your site.

For Example, if you go in the Layout area, you can configure detailed settings for yourown:

Header — you can move your header round and alter 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 — like featured image dimensions, metadata, etc..
Footer layout — just like how many widgets to include

Likewise, The Typography area lets you control the font for every single element on your site, such as buttons:

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

All In all, GeneratePress will provide you much more customization options in the WordPress Customizer compared to most other themes. This level of detail might be a bit overwhelming if you’re a newcomer. But once you realize how the settings come together, you’ll have complete control on how your site appears.

Optimized Performance And Quick Page Load Times

Around All of its features, GeneratePress always includes a focus on exceptional performance and tidy code. The whole motif 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 themes are still 200+ kB. And some poorly coded themes can even surpass 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 theme. How fast? To give you an idea, I ran a little test.

First, I set up an empty website utilizing a random popular WordPress.org motif (Envo Magazine). After analyzing its performance with Pingdom, it

Had a performance grade of 77
Loaded in 1.05 moments
Had a page size of 243.9 kB
Had 15 asks

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

Next, I triggered GeneratePress on the exact same test website without changing anything else. Here’s 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% fewer

If You perform the exact same test with different topics, you are going to continue to see that GeneratePress is among those fastest-loading WordPress topics in existence. WordPress Design Help

Other Helpful Premium Extensions, Plus A Modular Approach

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

Elements — a exceptional feature that allows 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 sort of like lightweight page construction. It lets you create separate”sections” onto a webpage, each with their own layout and column settings.

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

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

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

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

Earlier In 2018, however, the programmer added a fresh Site Library attribute for GeneratePress Premium users which lets you easily import any among 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 on a few buttons to import a presentation site.

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

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

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

You Can utilize this meta box to:

Change how many sidebars your site uses, or the sidebar orientation (like changing 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, article title, or footer
Produce a special”container” to your own page builder

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

By Disabling certain components, you’re in a position to create the correct baseline for your own page builder design, which makes it effortless to create custom articles as needed. WordPress Design Help

GeneratePress Replies: Cheap And Works On Unlimited Sites

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

Nevertheless, If you are serious about utilizing GeneratePress, I feel you should buy the GeneratePress Premium plugin, as that is what produces the theme so elastic. The free version does not give you almost as numerous configurations in the WordPress Customizer. And you’ll also lose out on the premade Site Library.

GeneratePress Premium is also still fairly reasonably priced. It costs only $39.95, which gives you use on unlimited 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 beating — you just won’t get any more updates).

When You consider the typical premium WordPress theme will usually cost around $60, GeneratePress provides a great value.

Summary

As I mentioned, I don’t believe GeneratePress is for everyone.

If You want a niche-specific theme, you can probably save time by buying a theme that satisfies your requirements for your niche out of day one.

But If you are willing to spend some time changing preferences, then GeneratePress’ style controls give you the flexibility to flip it into any type of WordPress site. Or, you may even be able to locate a starter website that fits your needs to save a little time.

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

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