The theme you use for your WordPress website is very important in its success. It can either make the website faster and easier to read for the audience or slow it down. There are many other functionalities of the website which depend on the theme.
When looking for a popular theme, you will often come across GeneratePress. It has gained huge popularity and thousands of users over the years. However, is it any good?
Our GeneratePress review today will answer that.
What is GeneratePress?
GeneratePress is a multipurpose WordPress theme with high stability, fast loading time, excellent customization options, and a minimalistic design.
The good news is that it can be used to create a blog, an e-commerce store, and much more. That is only possible because of the excellent customization options it has.
Once you go through the features below, it is easy to understand how it can achieve all of that.
GeneratePress features:
Below, we give a glimpse of various features of GeneratePress.
1. Easy to customize the theme:
To start with, the customization options you get in GeneratePress are plenty. It has open-source code, which means that you can modify every detail of your website. However, even if you know, you can still modify every detail of your website through the builder that it provides. Some of the aspects of your website that you can easily modify include the following:
Site identity:
Site identity is hardly present in any other theme. It allows you to modify the tagline, logo, and site title simultaneously.
Layout:
The layout tab allows you to modify the primary navigation, sidebars, footer, blog, as well as the header of the website.
Colors:
There are separate color options that allow you to modify things like background color, text color, link color, blog post title color, and so on.
Typography:
Additionally, if you want to play around with the fonts, there are 70 different options available.
Menus:
The menus menu allows you to control the main menu and footer menu. You can easily create new menus as well.
These are just some of the customization options that GeneratePress offers you. There are a host of other options that you can explore once you install the theme.
2. Template library available:
Many Webmasters do not want to create a site or a blog from scratch. For them, GeneratePress premium has a wide variety of templates to import. It calls this option the site’s library. Whether you want to start a blog or e-commerce store, numerous designs and templates are available to import and customize the text according to your requirement easily. Creating a website within a single day can save you days of work.
3. Excellent loading speed:
The average page size in GeneratePress is just 7.5 KB. It has zero dependencies. If you tried improving the speed of a website previously, you would know that such metrics ensure that your website is blazing fast. No wonder, when you test your GeneratePress website on tools like Gtmetrix, you get 100% page speed scores.
Since speed is a factor that search engines consider while ranking your website, it means that you are likely to get more search engine traffic.
4. Woocommerce compatible:
Most other WordPress themes allow you to create corporate websites, blogs, etc. GeneratePress is woocommerce compatible as well. Consequently, it becomes easy for you to create an e-commerce store.
Also, it does not hamper the scalability of woocommerce; even if you want to list hundreds of products, you can do that.
5. Offers hook system:
Usually, when customizing the WordPress theme, you create a child theme to ensure that the settings of the original one aren’t changed. However, with GeneratePress, there is no need to spend time creating a child theme either. It offers you a hook system. Through the hook system, you can insert dynamic elements and customize the website’s design. It allows you to add the CSS code if you want to do so as well.
By doing so, you will not have to worry about dealing with child and parent themes. Customization can be done in real-time, which saves a lot of time.
6. Premium support:
GeneratePress has a versatile theme. That is why; you will need at least some help using it. Fortunately, it offers vast documentation for troubleshooting. There is even a support forum. You can gain help through tickets as well.
However, if you expect corporate-style support, that won’t be the case with GeneratePress.
7. Numerous styling controls:
Usually, when you want to customize any aspect of a WordPress theme, like a background image, you will have to struggle with the controls and the freedom you get to customize.
However, with GeneratePress, you can customize every styling aspect:
- Typography
- Spacing
- Color
- Background image
And so on
With detailed documentation available, it is easy to know how to customize any of these aspects.
8. Mobile compatible header:
The entire theme is mobile-compatible. However, certain special features make it even more convenient for mobile users.
For example, the low-profile header ensures that the mobile user can easily view your website’s text or main elements rather than navigating around the header.
9. Lightweight design:
In the zipped format, the folder of GeneratePress (free version) is as small as 61kb. The point we are trying to make is that it is one of the most lightweight themes you can find. Even if you compare the premium version of GeneratePress with other premium themes, you will realize that the size is less than others.
It means it won’t occupy much space in your hosting account. That way, you can use shared hosting, and there is no need to go for a dedicated server or a VPS to host the website.
The lightweight design is another reason the speed of your website will be blazing fast.
10. Excellent compatibility:
That option is also available if you want to use it, along with a page builder like Thrive. It is compatible with most third-party page builders and designing plug-ins straight out of the box. If you want to further enhance its customization capabilities, you can do so.
Pricing options:
GeneratePress has a free version with limited features. Apart from that, we will highlight two pricing options below.
- In the yearly option, you pay $59 and get all the premium features, including access to the site library. One year of updates and one year of premium support is included. You can use the theme on 500 different websites.
- The lifetime option involves a one-time payment of $249 and offers you everything in the yearly package but without any annual payments.
GeneratePress Premium vs. Free:
Throughout the article, you might have noticed that we have referred to GeneratePress free and GeneratePress premium themes. That is because GeneratePress offers you both versions.
What’s the difference between both?
We will highlight the most important distinctions below.
1. Customization options:
The customization options in the free version are pretty limited. For example, you won’t get the import/export option, site library, or the different element options. You can only create a basic blog with a basic homepage layout in the free option. All these features are available in the GeneratePress premium option.
2. Woocommerce compatibility:
GeneratePress free is only suitable for creating a normal blog. If you want to create an e-commerce store with woocommerce, you must opt for GeneratePress premium.
3. Branding options:
GeneratePress free doesn’t allow you to remove the copyright. To do so, you need to go for GeneratePress premium.
4. Separate blog module:
If you want to create a magazine, corporate website, or any other website with a separate blog module that isn’t entirely a blog, that functionality is only available in GeneratePress premium. If you want to create a simple blog, GeneratePress free is suitable for you.
5. Support:
Premium support like tickets isn’t available to GeneratePress free users. That is why you must search around extensive documentation when using GeneratePress free version.
6. Menu options:
Most menu options like site identity, typography settings, menu plus, secondary navigation options are available only to GeneratePress premium users.
Whom is GeneratePress suitable for?
We will help you understand which version of GeneratePress is suitable for whom.
You can go with GeneratePress free theme if:
- You just want to create a blog or a basic website.
- You need a minimalistic design and basic features.
You should go with the GeneratePress premium theme if:
- You need a fully customizable website.
- You’re looking to grow and scale your website over a while.
- You’re serious about monetizing your website.
- You want to control numerous aspects of your website so that it ranks in the search engines and provides the best possible user experience.
- You want to exploit the functionalities of GeneratePress to the maximum through third-party integration tools.
Pros of GeneratePress:
- Extremely versatile
- Easy to customize almost every feature
- Extensive documentation available
- Blazing fast
- Minimalistic and lightweight design
- 30-day money-back guarantee
- Can be used on 500 websites (premium version)
Cons of GeneratePress:
- The free version has very limited capabilities
- Support is on the slow side
Final verdict:
GeneratePress is a WordPress theme that can provide you an edge over competitors because of its blazing-fast design and excellent customization options. Couple that with ease of use and scalability, and it is easy to understand why this theme is so popular. We would go ahead and recommend you this theme if you’re looking for a theme that improves the user experience and ranks your website better.