Background WordPress Gallery Theme

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, which was fairly good. But I still had to do a great deal of customization to make it perform and work how I wanted it to. A couple weeks ago I decided to provide GeneratePress a try, and let me just say, it is by far the best WordPress theme I’ve found in a decade . I had been dismissed and am now moving all of my sites to GeneratePress. I’ll go into 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 in addition to many other lightweight and thicker multicolored themes. WordPress Gallery Theme

To Begin, Click here to download GeneratePress.

GeneratePress Review

GeneratePress is a free WordPress theme made by Tom Usborne, a programmer from Canada. I’ve really seen it for years in the WordPress repository. Most of you realize that I’m pretty picky when it comes to web performance, so I tend to dismiss everything from the repository. Typically because a great deal of stuff on there is not that good, or not encouraged for long. However, in this case, that was a mistake. The theme currently has over half a million downloads, 80,000+ busy 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 premium version. I could tell right off the bat, the developer was thinking precisely how I was envisioning a theme should get the job done. And I will go into that more below, but let’s first look at a number of the features. I will be covering the premium version of the subject, because it’s worth . Actually, Tom, in the event that you read this and are seeing Scottsdale, Arizona, java on me.

Features

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

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

Additionally, it works great with all the favorite 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 individuals using Beaver Builder have experienced success.

Translation ready.

Font wonderful built-in.

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

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

The Documentation can be unbelievable. Besides have great documentation on their website, the subject has been around long enough that everything I Googled throughout the setup procedure was found within a couple of seconds in their own forum.

Diving Into GeneratePress

Now it’s Time to the fun part! I always test a new theme right out of the box without any customizations to just see how fast the base 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 motif on Kinsta hosting clocked in at a whopping 265 ms loading time. I was quite impressed.

One Thing I was worried about with GeneratePress was that the modular design was going to produce a lot of big files, but this is not the situation. You can tell that Tom actually worked hard on ensuring every file packed in GeneratePress is as little as possible. With HTTP/2, the number of files is not as important. But the dimensions is! Take 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

This 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 possible get them. In fact, Font Awesome is most likely the biggest file included. And that isn’t even his. Together with Font Awesome 5 arriving around the corner, we could anticipate that to secure smaller too.

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

If You’re interested, I am using the next add-ons on this site:

Website

Shades

Hooks

Page Header

Spacing

Typography

No Child Theme Needed

One of The best characteristics of GeneratePress is I no more need to use a young child motif . This makes my life so much easier. No longer editing my functions.php or header.php documents. I can literally upgrade my GeneratePress motif this exact minute rather than shed one customization. The hooks add-on definitely helps make this possible. It permits you to add custom code/PHP anywhere throughout your WordPress website. WordPress Gallery Theme

Other Things I Love About GeneratePress

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

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

The WordPress customizer options is where GeneratePress really shines! Remember, a lot of these options are enabled by the superior add-ons. I can’t show you everything, otherwise, we’d 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 your free Lightweight Grid Columns. Not to my surprise, this is also created by the same programmer as GeneratePress. It allows you a super simple way to add responsive columns to any page or post. Characteristics include:

Desktop grid width

Tablet grid thickness

Mobile grid width

Add Customized classes

Insert custom inline designs

Equal height columns

This is An example below:

You May Want to Also catch his amazing WP Display 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 display posts from a specific”featured” category. You can also get it show past modified/updated articles, recent articles, etc.. I am using the free version and it works terrific.

To Get started, 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. Think of it like a webpage builder without the bloat. GeneratePress is definitely not just for blogs! I am in reality utilizing 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 nothing like a site.

Speed Tests

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

woorkup.com Old MyThemeShop Theme

My older MyThemeShop motif was already pretty fast, but I spent a great deal 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 today is, just get GeneratePress!

woorkup.com New GeneratePress Theme

Together with the New GeneratePress theme I was able to achieve faster speeds and 600 fewer lines of code! And keep in mind, I do not have a child theme. Each of the customizations were created with the awesome GP hooks and snippets plugin (both CSS and PHP).

Like the WordPress theme I’ve working on woorkup? You are in luck. Tom asked if he can make a replica of woorkup for the new GeneratePress blog library. I’m pleased to allow you to know that now you can put in my woorkup motif in your GeneratePress website with only a click! It’s called the Marketer theme. Get started with a great blog design instantly.

brianjackson.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

I also Moved over my private site, brianjackson.io, to GeneratePress. Previously I was using a motif from Array Themes. It is a pretty basic minimal site, since I do not use it to get much. As 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 an hour. And since you can see it loads even faster! Amazing. I was able to eliminate a couple plugins that weren’t needed because of GP.

forgemedia.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

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

forgemedia.io New GeneratePress Theme

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

I can not express my Excitement about finding GeneratePress and I am moving over all my websites for this (which includes several EDD e-commerce sites). Once I’ve got my 9 sites 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 correct 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 Good For…

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

You Can make GeneratePress perform pretty much anything. And since GeneratePress has a focus on performance, the site 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 normally pair it with a WordPress site builder and use it for literally any type of site.

But GeneratePress Might Not Be A Fantastic Combination If…

…you Need something that will instantly appear perfect out of the box.

For Example, if you realize you wish to create a fashion blog, you might be happier choosing a niche theme that’s developed exclusively for fashion bloggers.

While GeneratePress has gotten 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 want it to, you’ll most likely will need to go in and personalize things. And though the substantial advantage of GeneratePress is how customizable it is, many users, particularly casual users, do not like having to make those changes .

GeneratePress Features That Make It Unique

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

Lots Of Customization Options From The Real-Time WordPress Customizer

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

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

The Free variant of GeneratePress provides you decent possibilities, but should you own GeneratePress Premium, you’ll have the ability to customize nearly all about your site.

For Example, if you go in the Design region, you can configure detailed settings for yourown:

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

Likewise, That the Typography area enables you to control the font to get each and every element on your site, such as buttons:

And You also receive a thorough region to control the colour of every single element on your website.

All Whatsoever, GeneratePress will give you much more customization options in the WordPress Customizer than most other topics. This amount of detail might be a bit overwhelming if you’re a newcomer. But once you understand the way the settings come together, you will have complete control on how your site appears.

Optimized Performance And Fast Page Load Times

Around All of its features, GeneratePress consistently includes a focus on exceptional performance and clean code. The whole theme is less than 30 kB, and it will be about as little as you’ll ever find for a WordPress theme. Even most other optimized WordPress topics are still 200+ kB. And some badly 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 quickly? To give you a sense, I conducted a small test.

First, I put up an empty website using a random popular WordPress.org theme (Envo Magazine). After analyzing its functionality with Pingdom, it:

Had a performance grade 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! But GeneratePress can do better.

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

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

If You perform the exact same test with different themes, you are going to continue to find that GeneratePress is among those fastest-loading WordPress themes in life. WordPress Gallery Theme

Other Helpful Premium Extensions, Plus A Modular Approach

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

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

To Remain lightweight, GeneratePress also provides you a modular port where you can pick and choose exactly which features you want to trigger.

That Way, you do not have to slow down your site for a quality which you’ll never 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 no matter what, which made the theme difficult for casual users to set up.

Earlier In 2018, however, the developer added a fresh Site Library attribute for GeneratePress Premium users which lets you easily import any one of those 25+ pre-built demonstration websites .

You Can import them directly from your WordPress dashboard.

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

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

With Most topics, each page and post will use the same settings for the most part. You may have some custom formats or templates — but you don’t have very much control past that.

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

You Can use this meta box to:

Change how many sidebars your website uses, or the sidebar orientation (like changing the sidebar from right to left)
Choose the number of footer widgets to utilize
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 would be the most useful is if you’re using a WordPress site builder.

By Disabling certain elements, you are able to produce the correct baseline for your own page builder layout, making it effortless to create custom articles as needed. WordPress Gallery Theme

GeneratePress Pricing: Cheap And Works On Unlimited Sites

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

Nevertheless, If you are seriously interested in utilizing GeneratePress, I feel you should purchase the GeneratePress Premium plugin, as that’s what makes the theme so elastic. The free version doesn’t give you nearly as many settings in the WordPress Customizer. And you’ll also miss out on the premade Site Library.

GeneratePress Premium is also still fairly reasonably priced. It costs just $39.95, which provides you use on infinite websites . You’ll also get a 40% discount if you want to renew to keep on receiving support and upgrades after the initial year (you can, obviously, continue using GeneratePress after the first year without renewing — you won’t receive any more upgrades ).

When You believe the normal premium WordPress theme will often cost around $60, GeneratePress provides 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 from day one.

But If you’re ready to spend some time altering settings, GeneratePress’ style controls give you the flexibility to flip it into any type of WordPress site. Or, you may even be able to find a starter website that fulfills your needs to save some time.

Additionally, It is among those fastest-loading WordPress topics you will find. So if you’re seeking the best performance possible, using GeneratePress as your WordPress site’s base is a good decision.

If You combine it with fast-loading hosting, you shouldn’t have any problem making your website load in under one second. WordPress Gallery Theme