Intro WordPress Website Templates Free Download
Over the past ten years, I’ve used a great deal of different WordPress topics and have been really disappointed. Up until recently, I was utilizing MyThemeShop, that was pretty excellent. But I still had to perform a great deal of customization to allow it to perform and operate how I needed it to. A couple 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 10 years. I had been dismissed and am now moving all my sites to GeneratePress. I will enter precisely why in my comprehensive GeneratePress review below. And if you are wondering, yes I have attempted Genesis, Astra, OceanWP, Avada, X motif, Divi in addition to many other lightweight and thicker multi-purpose themes. WordPress Website Templates Free Download
To Get started, Click here to download GeneratePress.
GeneratePress Review
GeneratePress is a free WordPress theme made by Tom Usborne, a programmer from Canada. I’ve actually seen it for years from the WordPress repository. Most of you know that I’m pretty picky when it comes to web performance, and so I tend to dismiss everything from the repository. Typically because a lot of things on there is not that good, or not encouraged for long. Nonetheless, in this circumstance, this was a mistake. The theme now has more than half a million downloads, 80,000+ active matches, with over 500 5-star evaluations. So obviously Tom is doing some thing right here.
I Actually installed the free version of the theme and in a matter of 15 minutes purchased the superior version. I could tell right off the bat, the developer was thinking exactly how I was envisioning a theme should work. And I will go into that more below, but let us first look at a number of the qualities. I will be covering the premium version of the subject, because it’s worth . Actually, Tom, in the event that 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 only one of the greatest reasons I adore GeneratePress.
Responsive, looks great 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. Great browser service back to IE8.
It also 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 had success.
Translation ready.
Font wonderful built in.
A lot of hooks and filters that make it great for programmers.
Excellent active service from the developer. Normally, 3 updates per month.
The Documentation is also unbelievable. Besides have good documentation on their website, the theme has been around long enough that everything I Googled throughout the setup procedure was found inside a couple of seconds in their forum.
Going Deep Into GeneratePress
Now it’s Time to the fun part! I test a new theme right from 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 that I add everything for this. Running the inventory GeneratePress WordPress motif on Kinsta hosting clocked in at a whopping 265 ms loading time. I was very impressed.
One Thing I was concerned 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 may tell that Tom literally worked hard on making sure every file loaded in GeneratePress is as little as possible. With HTTP/2, the amount of files isn’t as significant. However, the dimensions is! Have a look 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 performance! And I have Seen exactly the same during each the premium add-ons. They’re as small as possible get them. In reality, Font Awesome is probably the largest file contained. And that is not even his. Together with Font Awesome 5 arriving round the corner, we could expect this to get smaller also.
The premium add-ons Are setup in what I’d call a modular design. It is possible to activate/deactivate anything you aren’t using to ensure they do not load on your website. Since the co-developer of the perfmatters plugin that has a script supervisor built-in, I felt at home for this. Everything should be designed this way.
If You’re curious, I am using the following add-ons on this website:
Blog
Shades
Copyright
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 young child theme. This makes my life much easier. No more editing my functions.php or header.php files. I will literally update my GeneratePress theme this exact minute rather than lose a single customization. The hooks add-on definitely helps make it possible. It allows you to add custom code/PHP everywhere throughout your WordPress site. WordPress Website Templates Free Download
Other Things I Love About GeneratePress
On every Page/post that you have a lot of alternatives. You can change the sidebar layout and the footer widgets.
You Can easily swap a page involving the default option to a full width page, as well as disable elements.
The WordPress customizer choices is where GeneratePress really shines! Remember, a lot of these choices are permitted from the premium add-ons. I can’t show you everything, otherwise, we would be here daily. But let me show you couple which actually come in handy.
Responsive Columns
Another Plugin I highly recommend grabbing is the free Lightweight Grid Columns. Not to my surprise, this is also created by the same developer as GeneratePress. It enables 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 custom courses
Add custom inline styles
Equal height columns
Here is An example below:
You May Want to Also catch his amazing WP Show Posts plugin too. See my featured posts on the sidebar of this website? That is using the WP Show Posts plugin. I have it set to show posts from a specific”featured” category. You can also have it show last modified/updated posts, recent articles, etc.. I am 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 version of GeneratePress allows you to perform all sorts of things concerning design. Consider it like a webpage builder without the bloat. GeneratePress is certainly not just for blogs! I am in fact using GeneratePress to our ecommerce site (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 all those Of you who are regular readers, you likely did not even notice that I changed the whole motif that forces woorkup.com. It only took me about an hour for GeneratePress to mimic my MyThemeShop theme which I had spent a year customizing. Here is a comparison under.
woorkup.com Old MyThemeShop Theme
My old MyThemeShop motif 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 my customizations. My advice today is, simply 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 remember, I do not have a child theme. All the customizations were created with the wonderful GP hooks and snippets plugin (both CSS and PHP).
Like the WordPress theme I have running on woorkup? You are in luck. Tom asked if he can make a replica of woorkup for the brand new GeneratePress blog library. I am happy to allow you to know that you can now install my woorkup motif in your own GeneratePress site with just a single click! It is called the Marketer motif. Get started with a great blog layout instantly.
brianjackson.io Old Array Theme’s Theme
Additionally, I Moved over my private site, brianjackson.io, to GeneratePress. Previously I had been using a motif from Array Themes. It is a fairly basic minimum site, since I do not use it to get much. Since you can see it already loaded pretty quickly.
brianjackson.io New GeneratePress Theme
I had been Able to duplicate the whole look 100 percent in GeneratePress in under one hour. And since you can see it loads even faster! Amazing. I was even able to get rid of a few plugins that weren’t needed because of 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 is a pretty basic minimal website, as we simply use it to our LLC. As you can see it loaded pretty quickly. WordPress Website Templates Free Download
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 whole page burden 2x!
I can not express my Excitement about locating GeneratePress and I am moving over all of my websites for this (which comprises some EDD e-commerce websites ). After I have my 9 websites all running in GP with no child themes, my life will be a breeze! The programmer has restored my faith in multi-purpose themes, and that when done the right way, can actually perform quicker.
And The best thing isI finally have a thousand more options to pick from than I did before.
What GeneratePress Is Good For…
GeneratePress Is the perfect option for performance-focused users who want to have the ability to personalize and control precisely how their site appears.
You Can make GeneratePress do pretty much anything. And because GeneratePress has a focus on functionality, the website that you build will have a great 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 website.
However GeneratePress Might Not Be A Good Combination If…
…you Want something that will immediately look perfect out of the box.
For Example, if you realize you want to create a style blog, you may be happier picking out a market theme that’s developed exclusively for fashion bloggers.
Even though GeneratePress is becoming a lot simpler to use, thanks to its pre-built Site Library, GeneratePress still seems very barebones when you initially install it.
So To create GeneratePress look how you want it to, you will almost certainly need to go in and personalize matters. And while the substantial advantage of GeneratePress is how customizable it is, some users, particularly casual users, don’t 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.
Lots Of Customization Options From The Real-Time WordPress Customizer
Past Functionality, another place where GeneratePress does well is its customization choices.
GeneratePress Utilizes the WordPress Customizer for customization, which is convenient because you’ll be able to see all the changes that you make in real time.
The Free variant of GeneratePress provides you adequate possibilities, but should you own GeneratePress Premium, you’ll have the ability to customize nearly all about your website.
For Example, if you go in the Design area, you can configure detailed settings for your:
- Header — you can move your header round and change its styling
- Navigation — GeneratePress gives you two different navigation options, including sticky menus
- Sidebar design — you can utilize a Couple of sidebars
- Blog post layout — such as featured image dimensions, metadata, etc..
- Footer layout — just like the number of widgets to include
Similarly, The Typography place enables you to control the font to get each and every element on your website, including buttons:
And You also get a thorough region to control the colour of each and every element on your site.
All In all, GeneratePress will give you a lot more customization choices from the WordPress Customizer compared to most other topics. This level of detail may be a little overwhelming if you’re a newcomer. But as soon as you understand the way the preferences come together, you will have complete control on how your website appears.
Optimized Performance And Fast Page Load Times
Around All its features, GeneratePress consistently includes a focus on excellent performance and clean code. The entire motif 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 some poorly coded topics can even surpass 1 MB!
GeneratePress Also has no code dependencies, which helps you avoid the leave blocking error that Google Pagespeed Insights often mentions.
Place That together, and you get a superfast-loading theme. How quickly? To give you a sense, I ran a small test.
First, I put up an empty website utilizing a haphazard popular WordPress.org motif (Envo Magazine). After testing its performance with Pingdom, it
- Had a performance tier of 77
- Loaded in 1.05 seconds
- Had a page size of 243.9 kB
- Had 15 requests
That’s Not bad in any way! However, GeneratePress can perform.
Next, I activated GeneratePress on exactly the same test website without changing anything else. Here is how GeneratePress did:
- 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 asks, ~40% less
If You do the exact same test with other themes, you’ll continue to see that GeneratePress is among those fastest-loading WordPress topics in life. WordPress Website Templates Free Download
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 helpful features such as:
- Elements — a unique feature which allows you create custom hooks, page headers, or design templates.
- Page Header — allows 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 different”sections” onto a page, each with their own layout and column settings.
To Remain lightweight, GeneratePress also gives you a modular interface where you can select and choose exactly which characteristics you would like to trigger.
That Way, you do not have to slow down your site for a feature which you’re never going to use.
Pre-Made Starter Sites Make It Easier To Design Your Site
In The past, you needed to build GeneratePress websites from a blank canvas no matter what, which left the motif difficult for casual users to install.
Earlier In 2018, however, the programmer added a new Site Library feature for GeneratePress Premium users that lets you easily import any among those 25+ pre-built demo sites.
You Can import them right from your WordPress dashboard.
Yes this Website 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 Every Bit Of Content
With Most themes, each post and page will use the very same configurations for the most part. You might have some custom templates or formats — however you do not have very much control past that.
GeneratePress Changes that by providing you a brand new Design meta name 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 how many footer widgets to use
- Disable certain components, such as your header, navigation menu, article featured picture, article title, or footer
- Create 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’re able to create the correct baseline for your page builder layout, which makes it effortless to create custom content as needed. WordPress Website Templates Free Download
GeneratePress Replies: Affordable And Works On Unlimited Sites
The Heart GeneratePress theme can be obtained for free at WordPress.org.
Nevertheless, If you’re serious about utilizing GeneratePress, I feel you should buy the GeneratePress Premium plugin, as that is what makes the theme so flexible. The free version doesn’t give you nearly as many settings in the WordPress Customizer. And you’ll also lose out on the premade Site Library.
GeneratePress Premium can be 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 updates after the first year (you can, of course, keep using GeneratePress following the initial year without renewing — you won’t receive any more upgrades ).
When You consider that the typical premium WordPress theme will often cost around $60, GeneratePress provides a fantastic value.
Summary
As I mentioned, I do not think GeneratePress is for everyone.
If You want a niche-specific motif, you can probably save time by purchasing a theme that satisfies your requirements for your market from day one.
However, If you are willing to spend some time changing settings, 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 website that fulfills your needs to save a little time.
Additionally, It’s one of those fastest-loading WordPress themes that you will locate. So if you’re seeking the best performance possible, using GeneratePress as your WordPress site’s base is a good choice.
If You blend it with fast-loading hosting, you shouldn’t have any problem making your website load in under one second. WordPress Website Templates Free Download
To Begin, Click here to download GeneratePress.