GeneratePress in a Nutshell
Excellent: 4.9 / 5
Pros:
Cons:
Bottom Line
I am a premium subscriber of GeneratePress and have been using it on most of my websites including Technicalwall.com. GeneratePress is very ease to use. Once you go through the documentation, you will be able customize each and every element of your website. Your website built on GeneratePress will the lightning fast and look impressive on all type of devices - Desktop, Tablet and Mobile.
In this GeneratePress review, I’ll explain its best features, benefits, price, pros and cons. It will help you to decide whether GeneratePress is the right theme for you or not.
Price: $59 per year
Free Trial: You can download the free theme from its official website to try it on your site. Plus, the purchase of premium version gives you 30-days money-back guarantee. If you don't like it, you can claim refund within the 30-days period.
After purchasing the domain name and best web hosting for your website, one of the most difficult decision one has to make is to select the right WordPress theme.
After trying one theme after another, you may find that it is getting more difficult to choose the best theme for your site. You'll find that instead of getting the best solution to your need, you have to dealt with all different kinds of questions.
Here are some common queries that often trouble newbie site owners when it comes to choosing the best WordPress themes.
Whether the theme will slow down my website?
Whether the theme is easy to customize?
Whether my website will look good on all devices?
Whether the theme is SEO-friendly?
Whether the theme is constantly updated by the developer?
Today, in this GeneratePress review, you'll be going to get answers to all these questions and more.
Since the launch of my blog Technicalwall.com in November 2019, I had tried many WordPress themes like Avada, Soledad and others. But I was looking for a theme which is very light weight, clean coded and most importantly optimized for speed & SEO.
With Google laying more importance to Core Web Vital metrics now a days, webmaster must ensure that their websites always remain fast to protect their rankings on search engines.
Though there are many factors that affects a website speed like hosting, caching plugin and others, the theme of your site is also one of the important factor.
Before we move ahead with the review, let's see how my website installed with GeneratePress theme performed at GTmetrix speed test.
The above performance score says it all about this WordPress theme. Though there are other factors also that contribute to these excellent score. Let me reveal all these below.
- Hosting. I am using A2 Hosting as my preferred web hosting. It offers Unlimited NVMe Storage, Turbo caching, LiteSpeed server to offer the fastest website speed.
- Caching. WP Rocket plugin takes care of caching, minification, compression, lazy loading, and other features to load my site super fast.
- CDN. I am using BunnyCDN to boost my website loading speed to every corner of the world.
- Image Compression. I am compressing all the images on my blog using ShortPixel.
You can see that GeneratePress is not the only factor for my website excellent speed. However, if your theme is heavy it will surely slow down your site even if you use all the above products as I mentioned.
So far we have seen how GeneratePress theme can speed up your site. But this alone should not be a criteria to purchase a theme. Let's see in the review, what are the other important factors that makes GeneratePress truly unbeatable in this segment.
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GeneratePress Review
GeneratePress is the best theme I have come across in my blogging career. It powers more than 400000+ websites all over the world and is one of the most popular WordPress premium themes.
Tom Usborne, the creator of GeneratePress, has kept the theme very lightweight which allows a website to load amazingly fast under 3 seconds.
The default GeneratePress theme is kept at less than 7.5 kb and has zero dependencies which gives the site super fast speed.
In this GeneratePress review, I will explain what are its important features and benefits that make this theme so much popular among bloggers. I will also share who should use the GeneratePress theme and how to install it on your WordPress website.
GeneratePress offers the following solution to its users:
- GeneratePress Theme - It's a free WordPress theme. You can download it for free from GeneratePress.com and also from the WordPress.org repository.
- GeneratePress Premium - It's a premium plugin that comes with premium features like Site Library, Premium Modules, 1 year of support & updates, and more.
GeneratePress Premium
The Best SEO-Optimized WordPress Theme
Important Features At A Glance:
- Used by 400000+ websites
- 1000+ 5-star rating in WordPress.org
- Easily compatible with almost every page builder like Elementor, Thrive Architect, etc
- Fully customizable
- All premium modules
- Super lightweight. Less than 7.5 kb in size. Load website under 2-3 seconds.
- Full access to the Site Library
- SEO Optimization with factors like HTML validation, schema.org markup, etc
- 1 year of support and updates
- 30 day money-back guarantee
Let's get started with the GeneratePress review where I have described what are its features, benefits, ease of use, price and pros & cons.
As a user of this theme myself, I am providing here an honest and unbiased GeneratePress theme review so that you can make an informed decision yourself.
In the above image, you can see that currently the active theme on my blog Technicalwall.com is GeneratePress.
GeneratePress Review: A Quick Introduction
GeneratePress is a multipurpose WordPress theme. Whatever may be your website niche you can use this theme and customize it according to your niche.
GeneratePress is regularly updated by its developer, Tom Usborne, with new features and functionality. It is currently active on over 400,000 sites and has also managed to maintain an incredible 1000 plus 5-star rating from its users.
GeneratePress comes with both the FREE and the PREMIUM version. To try GeneratePress you can download the free theme and use it on your website but it comes with limited customization options.
So, if you want to add more features and functionality along with some demo site library then you would need to subscribe and install the PREMIUM plugin alongside the FREE theme.
Who Should Use GeneratePress Theme?
If you are a performance-focused user who is looking for the fastest and SEO-optimized WordPress theme that is also easy to customize and control, then GeneratePress could be a perfect choice for you.
GeneratePress is loaded with wonderful features that allows you to do customize each aspects of your site. Also, as the developer of this theme laid more emphasis to keep the theme lightweight, the site built on GeneratePress will always be perfectly optimized for SEO and Speed.
Another advantage is that you can pair it up with popular page builder like Elementor, Thrive Architect or Divi to create almost any type of website.
Along side the GeneratePress Premium, you can also use the free GenerateBlocks plugin (by the same developer) to can build any section of your site (post meta, site footers, page heroes, author boxes, single post templates, custom 404 pages, custom post cards) without touching a line of code.
Whether you're a newbie blogger or an advanced user, if you're not happy with your current WordPress theme, I would recommend you to try GeneratePress Premium once. You won't regret it.
Try GeneratePress Premium today. Your purchase comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. You can always claim refund with in the guarantee period if you're not happy with the theme.
Who Should Not Use GeneratePress Theme?
If you are not comfortable doing all the customization in a WordPress theme and instead want something that will instantly look perfect out of the box for your website then GeneratePress may not a perfect fit for you.
There are many WordPress themes available online that are designed specifically for some particular niche.
For example, if you want to create a blog related to fitness then you may opt for a theme dedicated to this niche only.
GeneratePress Premium also comes with demo websites called Site Library but you can't use it straight away. You are required to do some customization to use its features and functionality.
However, GeneratePress is super simple to customize and you just need to go through the easy to follow documentation once to make your dream website.
If you get stuck at something, you can reach out to their excellent customer executives to resolve all your queries. Most of the queries are resolved within 24-hours.
I have also seen that the developer, Tom, himself answer many queries on the GeneratePress forum.
GeneratePress Free Theme Review
Let's get started with a review of GeneratePress free theme.
GeneratePress theme is free to use. You can download the free theme from the official website of GeneratePress. However, if you want premium features like Site Library, Element Module, and others, you would have to buy GeneratePress Premium which is a plugin.
We will discuss more about the plugin later in this article.
To download the free theme, click here to go to the GeneratePress website.
When you click the above link, you will be taken to the home page of GeneratePress where you can download the free theme.
On selecting the Install button, you will be taken to the download page. Select the Download button to download the free theme in a zip file.
After downloading the zip file of GeneratePress free theme, now it's time to install the theme on your website or blog.
Let's see how to install the free GeneratePress theme on a blog.
Login to your WordPress Dashboard and select Appearance >> Themes >> Add New.
Now, select Upload Theme and click on Choose File and select the zip file of the GeneratePress free theme.
Now select Install Now.
After successful installation, select Activate to set GeneratePress as your current theme for your website.
You can see in the above image that the GeneratePress free theme has replaced the Twenty Twenty theme as the current theme.
That's it, you have now successfully installed the GeneratePress free theme on your site.
The free version comes with very limited customization options. You can do all the customization under Appearance >> Customize.
Here, you will have the following option to customize your blog:
- Site Identity
- Layout
- Colors
- Typography
- General
- Menus
- Widgets
- Home Page Settings
- Additional CSS
However, all these customization features are very limited in function. Unless you upgrade to the premium version you will not have much options to customize your blog.
GeneratePress Premium Review
Let's see some of the specific features that makes GeneratePress a truly special WordPress theme.
1. Optimized For Speed and Performance
GeneratePress theme has been coded with focus on providing excellent performance. The code is clean and the default theme is just 30 Kb in size. Your website on default theme will load under 2 seconds. It would be really difficult for you to find any popular WordPress theme that is as small in size as GeneratePress.
It has been coded in the latest and most stable coding standards. jQuery which is often used by most popular WordPress themes has been replaced with Vanilla JavaScript that no more causes render-blocking issues.
All these features make GeneratePress truly optimized for speed and performance.
At the beginning of the GeneratePress review, I had already shown how it has improved the performance of my site with a perfect 100 score. Let's now check how a blank website performs on GeneratePress.
To compare the loading speed, I first loaded a random WordPress.org theme (Adventure Travelling) on a blank website and tested its loading speed on the Pingdom speed test tool.
Let' see the result.
Now, let's check the speed performance of the same site when GeneratePress theme is activated on it.
You can see that when GeneratePress theme is activated, the performance of the site increased significantly, both in terms of speed and performance.
Let's compare these figures in tabular form.
Benchmark | Adventure Travelling | GeneratePress |
---|---|---|
Performance Grade | 83 | 84 |
Page Size | 208.9 | 134.3 |
Request | 23 | 20 |
Load Time | 2.10 sec | 381 ms |
From the above comparison table it can be seen that the speed performance of the website installed with GeneratePress was way ahead of the website on Adventure Travelling theme in terms of Page Size, Request and more importantly Load Time.
The site loaded in just 382 ms.
It can be safely concluded that the GeneratePress theme is perfectly optimized for Performance with impressive Page Load Times.
2. Mobile Responsive
Currently, over 50% of Google searches are performed on mobile devices. My Google Analytics stats for my blog confirms that more than 50% of visitors are reading my blog from mobile devices.
Lately, websites that are not using mobile responsive themes are seeing a drop in rankings on Google search. Core Web Vital poor score will negatively impact those users who are not optimizing their website speed for mobile visitors.
No wonder that more and more developers are striving to keep their theme lightweight and mobile-responsive.
GeneratePress theme is perfectly optimized for mobile devices.
Sites made on this theme are mobile responsive and looks amazingly great on desktop, tablet and mobile.
Thus, you get one more reason to choose GeneratePress theme if your site with your current theme does not look good on mobile devices.
3. Real-Time WordPress Customizer
So far I have discussed the performance and mobile responsiveness, now let's talk about its customization options.
GeneratePress uses WordPress Customizer for all your customization needs. This works great because you can see all the changes that you make in real-time.
In the free version, the customization option is limited, however, if you are on GeneratePress Premium, you’ll be able to customize pretty much everything about your site.
To customize your website log in to your WordPress Dashboard and select Appearance >> Customize.
Now you will see the following customization options.
- Site Identity
- Layout
- Colors
- Typography
- General
- Menus
- Widgets
- Home Page Settings
- Additional CSS
You can customize each of these options and see the changes in real-time.
4. Premium Modules
Once you install the GeneratePress Premium plugin you get access to all the premium modules.
You can activate all or only those that you need on your site.
To activate the modules, go to Appearance >> GeneratePress, and select the modules and activate them.
After activating the modules, you can customize all the options under Appearance >> Customization.
5. Pre-Made Demo Site Library
Once you activate the Site Library module under Appearance >> GeneratePress, you get 30+ pre-built demo sites that you can easily import with a single click.
Under the Standard tab, there are 30+ pre-built demo sites created under the standard WordPress Editor.
Under Elementor tab, there are 10+ demo sites created using Elementor page builder and under Beaver Builder tab, there are 6 demo sites built with Beaver Builder page builder.
Just select any demo site of your choice and import it.
Your site will look exactly like the demo site imported, saving you lots of time and effort in creating your site from scratch.
Please Note: The demo content should only be imported on fresh websites that has no content. If you already have an established website, you should not import the demo content.
6. GeneratePress Can Be Used On 500 Websites
You can use GeneratePress theme for free on a website but it doesn't provide customization features and pre-built demo websites (Site Library) as offered in the premium version.
If you want more flexibility and customization feature in your site then you must consider buying the premium plan.
Many popular WordPress themes cost around $60 to $100 and can be used on a single website only. This means that if you want to use the same theme on another website, you will again have to purchase the same theme.
This is not the case with GeneratePress. A single license of GeneratePress Premium allows you to install it on 500 websites.
Suggested Reading: Generatepress free vs premium
Do You Even Need GeneratePress?
If you're looking to improve your website loading speed as well as your Core Web Vital metrics, you must consider using GeneratePress Premium on your site.
The default GeneratePress theme is just 7.5kb page size, 2 HTTP requests, and zero dependencies. The free theme can provide you perfect foundation to help your site hit 100% Pagespeed Score.
If you don't want to start your website from scratch, you can make use of demo websites offered by GeneratePress.
The Site Library offers demo sites to create any kind of websites related to - an online shop, affiliate marketing, streaming, health and fitness, portfolio, coaching, food, dance, agency, and more.
The Modules - Backgrounds, Blog, Colors, Copyright, Disable Elements, Elements, Menu Plus, Secondary Nav, Sections, Site Library, Typography and others, give you much flexibility to customize every section of your website.
You're also not required to use them all. You have the option to activate only those that you need and leave others deactivated.
Get started with GeneratePress below.
Get GeneratePress Now
The best lightweight & SEO-friendly theme for WordPress website.
GeneratePress Premium Price
Premium WordPress themes typically cost around $60 to $100 but you can buy GeneratePress at a fixed price of $59. It also gives you the license to use it on 500 websites.
The price of GeneratePress Premium is quite affordable when you consider the fact that it can be used on 500 websites.
If you wish to renew your license, you will get a 40% discount on renewal and also continue to receive support and updates.
Even if you don't renew the license of the GeneratePress premium theme, you can keep using it. You just won't get any support and updates after the expiry of the license.
Another reason to buy GeneratePress Premium is that you are supported with a 30-day money-back guarantee. After 30-days of use, if you feel that it is not working as you had wished for, you can always ask for a refund.
What is holding you back? Buy GeneratePress Premium today.
How To Purchase GeneratePress Premium?
Please note that to use GeneratePress Premium you must keep installed the free GeneratePress theme.
Also note that GeneratePress Premium is a plugin that provides additional customization features and flexibility to the GeneratePress theme.
Many users get confused between GeneratePress theme and GeneratePress Premium plugin. I hope that I am able to clear this confusion.
To buy the GeneratePress Premium, click here.
Select Premium option and in the following page, select the Get it now button.
On selecting the Get it now button, you will be presented with two plans offered by GeneratePress - Yearly ($59) and Lifetime ($249).
Go for Yearly Plan if you don't want to invest a huge amount upfront.
I would also advise you to not to go for Lifetime Plan as you would be paying almost 5 year price at a single go.
Select Get Started under Yearly Plan, make payment with your credit card or PayPal account. On successful payment you will be able to download the GeneratePress Premium plugin in a zip file.
Now install and activate the GeneratePress Premium plugin as you would do in case of any other plugins.
Go to Plugins >> Add New >> Upload Plugin.
Select the zip file of GP Premium plugin by selecting Choose File and choose Install Now. After successful installation, activate the plugin. That's it.
GeneratePress Premium is now successfully added with all the premium modules, demo site library and many other features.
Frequently Asked Questions
GeneratePress can be used on how many websites?
GeneratePress free theme can be used on as many sites as you wish. If you buy the GeneratePress Premium, it can be installed on 500 number of websites.
Does GeneratePress Premium comes with any money-back guarantee?
Yes, GeneratePress Premium comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. So, you can try GeneratePress Premium risk-free for 30-days. If you don't like the theme or it doesn't work as you may have liked, then you can ask for refund within 30-days from the date of purchase.
Do I need to renew my license every year?
Renewal of license is completely optional. If you renew the license, you would continue to get support and updates. You get a good 40% discount on renewal so, there is no obvious reason not to renew it. However, if you decide not to renew it, your GeneratePress theme will still be remain fully functional but you won't get any support or updates from GeneratePress.
Can GeneratePress be used with landing page builders?
Yes, GeneratePress can easily be used with popular page builders like Elementor or Thrive Architect. Even in my blog, technicalwall.com I am using Thrive Architect page builder along with GeneratePress and it is working wonderfully well.
Does the GeneratePress free theme contains premium modules and Site Library?
No, the GeneratePress free themes does not contain premium modules and Site Library. It is only available with GeneratePress Premium plugin. So, if you want to activate premium modules or use any demo site library in your blog you would have to buy the GeneratePress Premium.
Is GeneratePress compatible with Gutenberg / Block Editor?
If you don't want to use page builder such as Elementor or Thrive Architect to build your web pages, you would be happy to know that GeneratePress works wonderfully well with the WordPress Block Editor. So, yes, GeneratePress is 100% compatible with the Block Editor.
My Verdict: Is GeneratePress Worth It?
GeneratePress is one of the fastest loading WordPress themes that you will ever find.
If you want to create a performance-focused, SEO-optimized and responsive site that loads very fast then I would recommend you to buy GeneratePress Premium to lay a great foundation for your site.
Just buy a single license and use it on 500 number of websites. GeneratePress Premium is definitely worth the price considering it's performance, features, and customer support.
While customizing GeneratePress, if you get stuck anywhere, you can take the help of detailed documentation that available on its website.
If you're still unable to solve it, you can always contact their very supportive customer support to resolve your issues. Most of the time you will receive response to your queries within 24-hours.
Working on your first blog can be a little intimidating in the beginning. I have created a detailed guide that can help you get started. Visit my How to Start a Blog Guide to set up your blog in the best possible way.
Have you ever tried the GeneratePress WordPress theme? Please share your experience in the comments below.
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