Brendan Tully0 Comments
August 11, 2022
GeneratePress is considered one of the best WordPress themes that you can find nowadays. But why exactly do a lot of people seem to favor this particular theme over all other WordPress themes, and why has it received such high praise?
The easiest way to explain this would be to simply say that it’s a reliable all-rounder that can provide pretty much any sort of company with the necessary features to make a high-end website.
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Given that this is a bit of an oversimplification, let’s get into our GeneratePress review.
When it comes to reliable site themes, GeneratePress is one of the most well-known and loved examples you can find. The theme has been on the market for about 5 years now, and during that time it has only kept improving and gaining speed.
The theme is versatile enough to be used in tandem with a large number of different types of sites, including WooCommerce focused and general WordPress sites alike.
GeneratePress can also be used with most of the other more popular page builders, but it works especially well with Beaver Builder, Elementor, and Divi.
GeneratePress has received mostly positive reviews so far. Most of the review websites that have rating systems have found that their polls usually result in the theme receiving 5/5 stars, or a score of 10/10, with the lowest scores not dropping more than 1 or 2 points from the more positive ones.
That being said, like every other theme on the market, GeneratePress has some weaknesses as well. Well, when we say weaknesses we mean that certain speed-focused or feature-focused themes will outclass it in certain areas, but that comes with a price.
These themes will either need to focus solely on features and neglect site speeds, do the exact opposite, or be very proficient at both, but charge obscene amounts for their services.
GeneratePress, on the other hand, is both quick and feature-heavy while being reasonably priced. This will all depend on the exact package you choose, of course, but we’ll get to that a bit later.
The way that most themes handle the burden of increasing the site render times and page load times is by either using specific boosters or by minimizing the amount of extra code that appears in the theme itself.
While GeneratePress also has WooCommerce boosted modules, the main reason why it can help make your site a bit faster is that the code itself is so air-tight that very little CPU power needs to be expanded on processes that aren’t necessary or can be removed entirely.
The theme itself only takes up slightly more than 60 kb of disc space, and even using all of the built-in modules simultaneously doesn’t affect the loading speeds all that much. There will naturally be a slow-down of about 0.2 seconds on the page rendering speeds, but that can easily be fixed by turning off specific modules or unnecessary background features.
Pretty much every theme has the following three customization options. That being said, GeneratePress still provides a lot in terms of the versatility of the font, color, and layout options.
With these options, GeneratePress will help you create an eye-catching website, if that’s what you want. On the other hand, if you’d like a more simple design, there are a few more simplistic pre-built designs that provide a bit more empty space and aren’t so cluttered and busy.
What you decide to go with will naturally fall down to your personal preference as well as your audience.
GeneratePress allows you to customize any text you have on your site. This means that you’ll be able to change both the style and the letter spacing of all of the elements on your site. These elements include the header and footer, the basic text, image titles, menu and section names, and so on.
You’re also able to change the size of the letters to make things like the widgets and sidebars easier to locate or read, and even apply text transformations and change the font-weight. Additionally, you’re given the option to use any of the available Google fonts that you have on display.
The theme has a selection of over 60 different colors you can use to give your site a bit more character. The colors can be used on everything from the links that appear on your page, to the borders of your menus.
The large selection of colors can also help you to accent certain areas of your layout by creating a more striking contrast between two different tones to draw more attention to specific elements.
This method is usually used to great effects when it comes to making the header and footer more noticeable by making them a more saturated or a brighter shade of the opposing color that you decided to add to your background.
You can choose to apply any layout changes by simply going and editing any posts or elements in the actual pages where they’re located, or you can choose to use the general site customizer that’ll allow you to change any element from one menu. The choice is obviously yours, but for our money, it’s much simpler to use the customizer.
You can change everything from the dimensions of the menus, the visibility or transparency levels of certain sidebars, the amount of the screen space the page content should take up, and so on.
The customizer also allows you to disable certain elements at a time. This is mostly used if you have widgets that take up a lot of processing power, or if you have any background features that aren’t very useful but they’re slowing down your site by remaining active.
The theme has a free version and a premium version. The free version comes with the perks that we’ve just mentioned, however, if you want access to the premium modules and the site library, then you’re going to need to be prepared to pay the yearly fee of $49.95.
If you do decide to make the purchase, you’ll be allowed to use the theme on an unlimited number of websites, receive a full year of updates, and you’ll even get 40% off on the renewal fee, on top of the 30-day money-back guarantee.
This is quite frankly a steal of a deal considering that for a little over $4 a month you’re getting access to a fantastic library of pre-made site designs, as well as a large number of very useful modules.
These are some of the most useful features of any theme. In essence, they are sort of control centers that allow you to make a large number of small or drastic modifications to certain features on your site.
The convenience that these modules provide is that they allow you to make all of these changes from one menu, whereas it would usually require you to seek out and modify the individual elements by hand, which is a lot more time consuming and tedious.
The blog module is essentially there to help you add a few things to the post that you put on your site. It will allow you to add the post date, the author of the post, the category, and also certain tags.
You’ll also be able to show the comment count and enable the use of infinite scroll on your page.
Finally, you’ll also be able to include any images in your posts and even place a set requirement for the number of characters that the excerpt should have.
This module will allow you to place background images on most of the elements of your site. The menu in the module will display options for body, header, primary navigation, primary sub-navigation, secondary navigation, and so on.
The title of this section is pretty self-explanatory – this module allows you to disable certain elements on the theme.
This is one of the most useful features that you can have if you’re trying to make your page load times as fast as possible. This module will allow you to look through all of the background apps, widgets, and other elements that are currently active on your site and turn a certain number of them off.
Rather than the number of different elements, the exact element that you disable will have a lot more impact on render times. Simply put, this means that disabling the header, footer, and content title can sometimes be less effective than simply disabling the primary navigation.
If used correctly, this can really boost your site speed, just be wary of turning off any vital elements or even going overboard on the number of elements you disable.
This module takes the form of a drop-down menu that allows you to select between the header, hook and layout elements in order to modify them.
This module will naturally require you to already have the WooCommerce plugin installed, in order to make changes to your WooCommerce store. This means that you’ll be able to modify everything from the font and spacing between the letters, to the specific color that you want to use for your menus or text.
If you don’t run an eCommerce site, then this module will be practically useless for you. If you do run a product-focused site, then this is without a doubt one of the modules you need the most.
The site library on GeneratePress offers a large number of pre-built sites that you can use as a template for your own. You can later choose to modify these sample sites in small or more drastic ways in order to fit your personal preferences better, or simply keep them the way they are.
Considering just how many pre-designed sites there are for you to choose from, you might want to either pick one that you really like the look of, or simply get one that’s close to what you’re looking for and simply modify it a bit.
Alternatively, you can go for a simpler site design to use as a template and build your own layout from there.
Whatever your preference, we’d like to recommend the following 10 templates that you have at your disposal once you get GeneratePress. These aren’t the undisputed best-of-the-best or anything like that, but they are all unique enough that they can be very useful for specific types of sites.
Mentor has a sleek black look to it and it can give your site a very professional feel. Everything from the header color, to the bold font of the letters and the white text color, is used to make the elements of the site pop-out from the dark background and really help draw the eye of your visitors to the most important elements on display.
The theme was built with the use of Elementor and any modifications that need to be made should be done using the same page builder.
As you might be able to tell by the name, this is the perfect choice for blogs and column style sites. These sorts of sites are naturally going to contain a lot of articles and text posts, so the white background is a required element, at least if you want your visitors to be able to read the text on-screen with as little eye-strain as possible.
The design is very reminiscent of a lot of magazines and news sites, selecting to keep the layout of the page to the most important menus and elements without cluttering it up with unnecessary sidebars and widgets.
Seller is a site that was designed specifically to display a large number of products on each page. Much like the design of “Read”, the page background is white so that the product images and information can be easier to see and read.
The font choice is usually a bit more fancy looking and it serves to add a little touch of design to the otherwise very small amount of decorations that this site design has.
Seller can be modified by using any page builder or the GeneratePress customizer options.
As their landing site says, Studio is a very minimalistic GeneratePress site. Everything from the background to the menus and the header font is made so that it can interact well with the Beaver Builder.
As long as you have at least a semi-decent understanding of how this particular page builder works, then you can really have some fun with this design and add some interesting elements to it.
More inexperienced users can also simply use the customizer to make any necessary changes or disable any elements that aren’t working for them.
Pixel is a site that was designed with photography in mind. The layout of each page is centered around fitting as many high-quality pictures on the screen as possible at any one time.
This site takes up a bit more CPU power than the others purely because of the lazy-loading options that need to always be on, as well as the sheer amount of pictures that it usually contains.
Although it uses a lot of disc space, the site design is still well optimized, and it handles the extra rendering slow-downs surprisingly efficiently.
This is another product-focused site that’s intentionally made to look similar to Amazon, down to the menu colors, product picture placements on the screen, and the way that the text is displayed as soon as a visitor clicks on it.
You can easily modify the design, so if you don’t think that the current layout is good enough, you can simply use the editor and move a few elements around to get a more unique look.
Prime can be edited either by using the GeneratePress customizer or by using almost any page builder.
This is a WordPress site designed for freelancers. Regardless if you’re a writer, photographer, blogger, or so on, this site design will likely have something to offer you.
The Elementor base makes it very easy to manage and modify the page layouts in order to better fit your own personal preference.
The site comes with your basic “About me” section, a few different menus at the top of the screen, a “Sign up” option for anyone looking to create a membership for your site so that they can keep up with your work, and a few other useful elements as well.
Similarly to the previous entry, this design is much more focused on marketing the abilities of the individual rather than any sort of company or product.
Coach allows you to essentially write out your entire resume and create a list of all of your qualifications so that any future employer or collaborator will have easy access to the list of skills that you possess and can bring to the table.
The site design also allows you to also add recommendations and referrals from people as well. This means that you can provide quotes and phone numbers of previous employers or co-workers that can vouch for you.
The colorful but minimalistic icons and the non-cluttered page layout are two of the biggest strengths that this site has. Both of these features are made possible thanks to the drag-and-drop creation function that allows you to create the layout one block at a time.
This is a great choice for everything from small to large-scale companies. The simple nature of the design makes it versatile enough to be used for pretty much any venture. This sort of design may seem sparse, but the final product is really striking when all of the elements come together.
Rumour is another great blog and article type of site design. This is actually almost the exact opposite of the previous blog site that we covered because it used black backgrounds and white text, whereas “Read” used white backgrounds and black text.
Your preference will be the deciding factor as to which one you choose, but we included it because dark themes with white text are actually very popular since people feel like their eyes aren’t under so much strain while reading due to the black colors.
The design also features some minimalistic icons that really add a touch of style.
Compared to other themes, GeneratePress has some of the best support options. This is in large part due to the fact that there are 2 ways in which you can get solutions to the problems you might be having.
Additionally, you can also visit the WordPress forums as well. GeneratePress is a very popular theme, so there are likely going to be at least a few posts about it a day.
As to the question if this is the best theme in 2024 – the answer is always going to come down to personal preference.
There is never going to be a consensus as to which theme is without a shadow of a doubt the best-of-the-best.
However, this GeneratePress review wasn’t made to change anyone’s mind. This article was made in order to point out some of the incredible features that this particular theme has, how it excels in nearly every area, and why it’s our personal choice for the best WordPress theme of 2024.
You might agree with us or you might not, but we do hope that we’ve at least given you a few reasons as to why you might want to give the free version a try.
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