It’s not often that I get impressed by a WordPress theme. I had my share of bad theme experience. I tried many frameworks but I ended up using Genesis framework on all of my sites and all the sites I build for the clients. A reason Genesis is praised by so many people is the fact that it’s very light. You would appreciate a light theme when you host your own website and when you blog a lot. In addition, a light theme is fast to load which helps you rank higher. Genesis is also praised with developers where it helps them build sites faster, much faster. What If I tell you that I found a great alternative, which is great, that I could easily call it – what Genesis should have been?
The GeneratePress theme is a free theme and can be found in WordPress repository. A free theme is impressive. When you look at the theme rating on WordPress theme repository, you will find something unordinary. Out of 455 votes, theme received 433 5 star votes and 2 4 star votes. That makes the theme one of the best-rated WordPress themes of all times.
What makes a GeneratePress theme so great? People are really amazed by the speed. All of the web speed services rate theme great for the speed. It’s also light for the web hosts. Unlike other bloated themes, where you can expect compatibility problems with the premium plugins, you won’t fund any problems with GeneratePress. Premium users love the support as they usually receive the answer with a solution withing an hour, sometimes minutes.
Theme features Font awesome integration and it integrates with several free and premium plugins as well.
The customizer
The customizer is where all the magic happens. Customizer is a WordPress way to customize the website. Some themes integrate controls inside customizer ( the correct way) while some other themes try to invent warm water all over again unnecessary bloat. In GeneratePress all the settings can be configured in the customizer, even premium add-ons are configured in the customizer giving the end user easy to use and navigate options.
You can customize just about anything and the best thing is that you can see the changes as soon as you change the settings. You can change Layout settings (Container, Header, Primary navigation, Sidebars, Footer), website colors (Body, Background, Primary Navigation, Content, Widgets, Forms, and Footer), Typography, Blog design (columns, excerpt, Masonry, Featured images), Background Images, Copyright information, Menus.
When you are configuring all the settings, you can switch to the responsive view and look how to settings will look on the mobile phone or a tablet view. Pretty amazing.
Premium add-ons to change the world
Premium add-ons are the bread and butter of the GeneratePress theme. A free theme has some options, but by enabling premium add-ons, you really gain access to all the options you can choose. What is good about the add-ons is that you can enable only the ones you need. That way you don’t add additional weight to the website if the feature is not needed.
Add-ons enable you to change any color you may want, give you all the options you need about fonts, you can add sections to the pages and create fast loading design pages, you can control the menu like you want, including options like logo, hiding menu, sticky and static navigation, fonts and various responsive settings.
In addition, you can create your own blog design, disable elements, use hooks, configure secondary navigation, add backgrounds and add page headers. The possibilities are endless.
WooCommerce and Plugin support
WooCommerce is the most popular store for WordPress. If you take a look at the demo GeneratePress website, you will notice a WooCommerce demo page. With the latest GeneratePress, a WooCommerce support has been greatly enhanced and can be even tweaked in the customizer. How awesome is that?
In addition, GeneratePress is compatible with WPML, all major page builders, SEO plugins and all other plugins if they are coded with the WP standards in mind.
What makes GeneratePress amazing
Great, theme is speedy, light, customizable, has great support for plugins, what else?
- Schema integrated
- Mobile optimized
- Secure and Stable
- Ongoing development with great support
- Great for developers with features like hooks and filters
A design is very Genesis like and the look of the basic site is very similar to Genesis basic.
I will explain that bit in a minute, but first, let’s discuss a different type of WordPress users to really understand the value of GP.
- Web sites featuring companies or products
- Woocommerce enabled Websites. Web sites used to sell the goods on the internet
- Blogs. Blogs for the companies or individuals who blog about practically everything.
My friend was a PHP programmer. He told me that once he programmed a website from zero. There were no templates. Sometimes he coded a plain HTML website but he used PHP skills to create a backend for the customer as well. Fast forward to the present and I can’t imagine anyone programming website from the start. Modern CMS like WordPress can make a huge difference in speed. Now, anyone can design his own website.
GeneratePress is a really amazing theme
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