Background Wp Theme Generator

Within the past 10 years, I’ve used a lot of different WordPress themes and have been really disappointed. Up until recently, I was using MyThemeShop, which was pretty excellent. But I still had to do a great deal of customization to allow it to do and work the way I wanted it to. A couple of weeks ago I decided to provide GeneratePress a try, and let me just say, it is by far the finest WordPress theme I’ve discovered in a decade . I was dismissed and am now moving all my websites to GeneratePress. I will enter precisely why in my comprehensive GeneratePress review under. And if you are wondering, yes I have tried Genesis, Astra, OceanWP, Avada, X theme, Divi in addition to many other lightweight and heavier multicolored themes. Wp Theme Generator

To Get started, Click here to download GeneratePress.

GeneratePress Evaluation

GeneratePress is a totally free WordPress theme made by Tom Usborne, a programmer from Canada. I’ve actually seen it for many years in the WordPress repository. Most of you know that I am pretty picky when it comes to web performance, so I have a tendency to dismiss everything from the repository. Typically because a great deal of stuff on there isn’t that great, or not supported for long. Nonetheless, in this case, that was a mistake. The theme now has more than half a million downloads, 80,000+ active matches, with over 500 5-star ratings. So obviously Tom is doing some thing right here.

I Really set up 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 get the job done. And I’ll go into that more below, but let us first look at a number of the features. I’m going to be covering the superior version of the theme, because it’s worth . In fact, Tom, if you read this and so are seeing Scottsdale, Arizona, coffees on me.

Characteristics

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

Responsive, looks fantastic across all of the devices.

Schema built-in, for greater outcomes in SERPs.

Impressive integration with the WordPress Customizer. I have not been a lover of the 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.

It also works great with the popular fast-growing Elementor page builder. If you would like to dive into even more customizations, these really are a great combo. I’ve also read that individuals using Beaver Builder have had success.

Translation ready.

Font wonderful built in.

Tons of filters and hooks which make it great for developers.

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

The Documentation can be unbelievable. Besides have good documentation on their website, the theme has existed long enough that everything I wholeheartedly throughout the setup process was found within a few 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 without any customizations to see how fast the base is. This tells me a lot of what I can expect by the time that I add everything to it. Running the stock GeneratePress WordPress motif on Kinsta hosting clocked in at a whopping 265 ms loading time. I was very impressed.

One Thing I was worried about with GeneratePress was that the modular design was going to generate a whole lot of big files, but that isn’t the case. You can tell that Tom actually worked hard on making sure every file packed in GeneratePress is as small as possible. Together with HTTP/2, the number of files isn’t as important. But the size is! Have a look at a few of the core 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

That is a developer that cares about performance! And I’ve Seen exactly the same throughout all the premium add-ons. They are literally as small as possible get them. In reality, Font Awesome is most likely the largest file contained. And that is not even his. With Font Awesome 5 arriving around the corner, we could expect this to secure smaller also.

The premium add-ons Are setup in what I would call a modular layout. It is possible to activate/deactivate whatever you aren’t using to guarantee they don’t load on your site. Since the co-developer of the perfmatters plugin that has a script manager built, I felt at home for this. Everything ought to be designed this way.

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

Website

Shades

Hooks

Page Header

Spacing

Typography

No Child Theme Needed

One of The best characteristics of GeneratePress is that I no more have to use a Child motif . This makes my life so much easier. No more editing my functions.php or header.php files. I can literally update my GeneratePress motif this very moment and not lose a single customization. The hooks add-on certainly helps make it possible. It allows you to add custom code/PHP everywhere throughout your WordPress website. Wp Theme Generator

Other Things I Love About GeneratePress

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

You Can easily swap a page between the default option to a complete width page, as well as disable elements.

The WordPress customizer options is really where GeneratePress really shines! Bear in mind, a lot of these choices are permitted by the superior add-ons. I can not show you everything, otherwise, we would be here daily. 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 precisely the exact same developer as GeneratePress. It enables you a super simple way to incorporate responsive columns to any page or article. Characteristics include:

Desktop grid width

Tablet grid width

Mobile grid thickness

Add Customized courses

Insert custom inline styles

Equal height columns

This is An example below:

You May Want to Also grab his incredible WP Show Posts plugin too. View my featured posts on the sidebar of this site? That’s using the WP Display Posts plugin. I have it set to display posts from a particular”featured” category. You might also get it show last modified/updated posts, recent articles, etc.. I am using the free version and it works terrific.

To Begin, Click here to download GeneratePress.

Sections Add-on

The Sections add-on in the premium edition of GeneratePress lets you do all kinds of things in terms of design. Consider it like a page builder with no bloat. GeneratePress is definitely not only for blogs! I’m in fact utilizing GeneratePress to our ecommerce website (perfmatters.io) that is running Easy Digital Downloads. Don’t hesitate to check it out. However, as you can see below, it looks nothing like a blog.

Speed Tests

For those Of you who are regular readers, you probably did not even notice that I changed the entire motif that forces woorkup.com. It just took me about an hour to get GeneratePress to mimic my MyThemeShop motif which I had spent annually customizing. Here’s a comparison under.

woorkup.com Old MyThemeShop Theme

My old MyThemeShop motif was already pretty quickly, but I spent a great deal of time scrutinizing it. In fact, I’ve gotten a lot of emails from you guys asking me to print all of my customizations. My advice today is, simply get GeneratePress!

woorkup.com New GeneratePress Theme

With the New GeneratePress theme I was able to attain faster speeds and 600 fewer lines of code! And remember, I don’t have a child motif. All the customizations were made using the awesome GP hooks and snippets plugin (both CSS and PHP).

Like the WordPress theme I’ve working on woorkup? You’re in luck. Tom asked if he can create a replica of woorkup to your new GeneratePress blog library. I’m happy to allow you to know that you can now install my woorkup motif in your GeneratePress site with only a single click! It’s called the Marketer theme. Get started with a fantastic blog layout immediately.

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 minimum website, since I don’t use it to get much. As you can see it already loaded pretty fast.

brianjackson.io New GeneratePress Theme

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

forgemedia.io Old Array Theme’s Theme

I also Moved over our organization website, forgemedia.io, to GeneratePress. Previously I was using a theme from Array Themes. It’s a fairly basic minimum website, as we just use it to our LLC. Since you can see it loaded pretty fast. Wp Theme Generator

forgemedia.io New GeneratePress Theme

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

I can’t express my Excitement about finding GeneratePress and I am moving over all of my websites to it (which comprises several EDD e-commerce websites ). Once I have my 9 websites all running in GP with no child themes, my entire life is going to be a breeze! The programmer has restored my faith in multi-purpose subjects , and that when done the correct way, can actually perform quicker.

And The best thing is, I now have a billion more choices to choose from than I did earlier.

What GeneratePress Is Great For…

GeneratePress Is the perfect option for performance-focused users who want to be able to customize and control precisely 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 great base to make it load fast.

Since Of that, people 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 Good Combination If…

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

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

While GeneratePress has gotten a lot simpler to use, as a result of its pre-built Site Library, GeneratePress still seems very barebones if you first install it.

So To create GeneratePress look how you would like it to, you will most likely will need to go in and customize things. And while the significant benefit of GeneratePress is how customizable it is, some users, especially casual users, do not like having to make those changes themselves.

GeneratePress Features Which Make It Unique

Here Are a few of the specific characteristics that clarify 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 options.

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

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

For Example, if you go in the Layout region, you can configure comprehensive settings to yourown:

Header — you can move your header around and alter its styling
Navigation — GeneratePress gives you two different navigation options, including sticky menus
Sidebar layout — you can utilize one or two sidebars
Blog post layout — such as featured picture size, metadata, etc..
Footer layout — like how many widgets to add

Similarly, That the Typography area lets you control the font for each and every element on your site, such as buttons:

And You also get a thorough area to control the color of every single element on your website.

All Whatsoever, GeneratePress will provide you a lot more customization options in the WordPress Customizer compared to most other themes. This amount of detail may be a bit overwhelming if you are a beginner. But as soon as you understand the way the preferences come together, you’ll have complete control over how your site looks.

Optimized Performance And Quick Page Load Times

Around All of its attributes, GeneratePress consistently has a focus on excellent performance and tidy code. The whole theme 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 a few poorly 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 cites.

Put That collectively, and you get a superfast-loading motif. How fast? To give you an idea, I ran a little test.

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

Had a performance tier of 77
Loaded in 1.05 moments
Had a page size of 243.9 kB
Had 15 requests

That is Not bad at all! However, GeneratePress can do better.

Next, I triggered GeneratePress on the same test website without changing anything else. Here’s how GeneratePress did:

Had a performance tier 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% less

If You perform that same test with other themes, you’ll continue to see that GeneratePress is one of those fastest-loading WordPress topics in life. Wp Theme Generator

Other Helpful Premium Extensions, Plus Much Modular Approach

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

Elements — a exceptional feature which allows you create customized hooks, page headers, or layout templates.
Page Header — allows you create a exceptional page header onto a per-page basis.
Sections — that is kind of like lightweight page building. It permits you to create different”sections” onto a webpage, each with their own layout and column settings.

To Stay lightweight, GeneratePress also provides you a modular port where you could pick and choose exactly which features you would like to activate.

That Way, you do not need to slow down your site for a feature that you’ll never use.

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

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

Earlier In 2018, though, the programmer added a fresh Site Library attribute for GeneratePress Premium users which allows 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 a couple buttons to import a presentation site.

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

With Most themes, 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 past that.

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

You Can use this meta box to:

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

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

By Disabling certain components, you are able to produce the correct baseline for your page builder layout, which makes it effortless to create custom articles as needed. Wp Theme Generator

GeneratePress Replies: Affordable And Works On Unlimited Sites

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

Nevertheless, If you’re serious about utilizing GeneratePress, I believe you should buy the GeneratePress Premium plugin, as that’s what produces the theme so elastic. The free version doesn’t give you nearly as numerous configurations from the WordPress Customizer. And you’ll also miss out on the premade Site Library.

GeneratePress Premium is also still fairly affordable. It costs only $39.95, and that provides you use on unlimited sites. You’ll 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 initial year without renewing — you just won’t receive any more upgrades ).

When You believe that the typical premium WordPress theme will often cost around $60, GeneratePress offers a fantastic value.

Conclusion

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

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

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

Additionally, It’s among the fastest-loading WordPress themes you will locate. Therefore, if you’re seeking the best performance possible, using GeneratePress as your WordPress site’s base is a good choice.

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