text: GeneratePress is a totally free WordPress theme created by Tom Usborne, a programmer from Canada. I have really seen it for many years in the WordPress repository. Most of you realize that I’m fairly picky when it comes to web performance, so I have a tendency to dismiss everything from the repository. Typically because a lot of things on there is not that good, or not encouraged for long. However, in this circumstance, this was a mistake. The motif now has over half a million downloads, 80,000+ active matches, with over 500 5-star ratings. So clearly Tom is doing something right here.
  I Really set up the free version of the theme and in a matter of 15 minutes bought 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 some of the features. I will be covering the premium edition of the theme, because it’s worth very penny. In fact, Tom, if you ever read this and are seeing Scottsdale, Arizona, coffees on me.
  The Documentation is also incredible. Besides have good documentation on their website, the theme has been around long enough that everything I Googled during the setup procedure was found inside a couple of seconds from their forum.
  Now it is Time to the fun part! I test a brand new theme right from the box without any customizations to just see how fast the foundation 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 quite impressed.
  This is a programmer that cares about performance! And I have Seen the same throughout each of the premium add-ons. They’re as small as you can possibly get them. In fact, Font Awesome is probably the largest file contained. And that isn’t even his. With Font Awesome 5 coming around the corner, we could anticipate this to get smaller too.
  The premium add-ons Are installation in what I would call a modular design. It is possible to activate/deactivate anything you are not using to ensure they do not load on your website. As the co-developer of the perfmatters plugin that has a script supervisor built-in, I felt at home with this. Everything should be designed this way.
  The WordPress customizer options is where GeneratePress really shines! Remember, lots of these choices are permitted by the premium add-ons. I can’t show you everything, otherwise, we would be here daily. But allow me to show you few which actually come in handy.
  You May Want to Also catch his incredible WP Show Posts plugin also. View my featured posts on the sidebar of this website? That is using the WP Display Posts plugin. I have it set to display posts from a specific”featured” category. You can also get it show last modified/updated articles, recent posts, etc.. I am using the free version and it works terrific.
  For those Of you who are regular readers, you likely did not even notice I changed the entire theme that forces woorkup.com. It just took me about an hour to get GeneratePress to mimic my MyThemeShop theme that I had spent a year customizing. Here is a comparison below.
  My old MyThemeShop motif was pretty fast, but I invested a great deal of time customizing it. In reality, I’ve gotten a lot of emails from you guys asking me to publish all my customizations. My advice now is, simply get GeneratePress!
  Together 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 created with the awesome GP hooks and snippets plugin (both CSS and PHP).
  Like the WordPress theme I have working on woorkup? You’re in luck. Tom asked if he can make a replica of woorkup to your brand new GeneratePress site library. I am pleased to allow you to know that you can now put in my woorkup motif in your own GeneratePress website with only a click! It’s known as the Marketer theme. Get started using a fantastic blog layout immediately.
  I also Moved within my personal website, brianjackson.io, to GeneratePress. Previously I had been using a theme from Array Themes. It’s a pretty basic minimal website, as I do not use it for much. As you can see it loaded pretty fast.
  I had been Able to replicate the whole appearance 100 percent in GeneratePress in under one hour. And since you can view it loads even faster! Amazing. I was able to eliminate a few plugins which weren’t needed due to GP.
  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 view it loads even faster! Amazing. I was able to eliminate a total of four plugins and it dropped my whole page weight 2x!
  I can not express my Excitement about locating GeneratePress and I am moving over all of my websites to it (which comprises some EDD e-commerce sites). Once I have my 9 sites all running in GP with no child themes, my life is going to be a breeze! The programmer has revived my faith in multi-purpose themes, which when done the correct way, can actually perform quicker.
  So To create GeneratePress look how you want it to, you will most likely need to go in and personalize things. And though the substantial benefit of GeneratePress is how customizable it is, many users, particularly casual users, don’t like having to make those changes themselves.
  All Whatsoever, GeneratePress will give you much more customization choices in the WordPress Customizer compared to most other themes. This level of detail may be a bit overwhelming if you are a newcomer. But once you realize the way the settings come together, you will have complete control on how your website looks.
  Across All its features, GeneratePress consistently has a focus on exceptional performance and tidy code. The whole motif is less than 30 kB, and it will be 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 exceed 1 MB!
  With Most topics, every post and page will use the same configurations for the most part. You might have some custom templates or formats — however you don’t have very much control beyond that.
  That said, If you are serious about using GeneratePress, I feel 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 numerous configurations from the WordPress Customizer. And you’ll also lose out on the premade Site Library.
  GeneratePress Premium can be still quite reasonably priced. It costs only $39.95, which gives you use on unlimited sites. You will also get a 40% discount if you would like to renew to continue receiving support and updates following the first year (you can, obviously, keep using GeneratePress following the initial year without beating — you just won’t receive any more upgrades ).
  But If you are willing to spend time changing preferences, then GeneratePress’ style controls give you the flexibility to turn it into any type of WordPress website. Or, you may even be able to find a starter website that fits your needs to save a little time.