GeneratePress Review

What platform should I choose to create my website?

What features do I require?

How well will my site operate if I use a specific solution to create it?

You’ve probably asked yourself these questions if you’ve ever wanted to create your own authority site.

Even if WordPress is the most popular platform for this, it still doesn’t answer all of the questions.

You must still choose a theme, a page builder, and some plugins.

GeneratePress wants to handle everything.

So, is it a decent option for you to use to create your website? Let’s take a look at our GeneratePress review to discover out.

Our Final Thoughts on GeneratePress

GeneratePress’s free version comes with a lot of features. Even without purchasing to the premium version, we think it’s one of the greatest themes available. If you’re undecided about which theme to choose and want something quick and light, GeneratePress is the way to go.

Upgrading to GP Premium is also a fantastic option if you enjoy the free theme or if you’re already sold on their system. It’s a fantastic addition to your internet marketing toolset because of the hook system, site library, and theme builder.

What exactly is GeneratePress?

GeneratePress is a minimalistic, low-code, and easy-to-customize multi-purpose WordPress theme.

It’s also small (61 KB), and it’s absolutely free to download and use (although there is a Premium version, which we’ll discuss later).

To give you a short answer, the GeneratePress theme is excellent.

You can go ahead and install it if you like it and want to be sure it’s a good decision.

It may be used to create anything from a blog to an ecommerce store.

But, should you get the free or premium version?

Is it possible to use it instead of a page builder?

The GP Premium plugin, as well as the free version, provide a terrific experience that integrates effortlessly into the WordPress dashboard without the need for a child theme.

To learn more, keep reading our GeneratePress review.

GeneratePress – Free Version Review

If you’re considering installing the GeneratePress free version, consider the following advantages and disadvantages.

In our review, we’ll go into all of GeneratePress’s nooks and crannies, but here’s a quick rundown of what you can anticipate from the GeneratePress theme:

Pros of GeneratePress:

• It’s light and quick. It is, in fact, the quickest WordPress theme available.
• Customization is simple.
• There are numerous possibilities for modifying your website.
• Supports a wide range of projects.
• Thrive Architect and Native Synergy

Cons of GeneratePress:

• There will be no drag-and-drop development. GeneratePress can still be used to produce attractive websites, but it has a significant disadvantage for non-technical users.
• When compared to other plugins, it’s not easy to interface with a lot of third parties.
• Important tools, such as blog layout editing, are missing.
• Even if the support forum is quite useful, the customer service is not the finest.

Features of GeneratePress

It’s not enough to list the benefits and drawbacks to get a fair idea of what the GeneratePress WordPress theme can do.

So let’s take a look at each of its features one by one, starting with the layout, colors, and typography and working our way up to custom code additions and other features to determine if it’s worth your time.

Identity of the Website

The site identification tab is similar to any other theme’s identity tab. It allows you to change the essential characteristics of your website, such as the title, logo, and tagline.

But there’s something else to consider regarding GeneratePress (and paid products from the company like GeneratePress Premium or GenerateBlocks).

They try not to stray too far from the WordPress customizer, while yet incorporating important functionality like as the site library module.

Yes, this does limit some of the more advanced customizing choices.

However, it allows the GeneratePress theme to be extremely lightweight, load quickly, and be edited more easily.

Layout

GeneratePress’ features begin to shine on the layout tab.

It allows you to customize the header, sidebars, footer, and blog area of your theme.

Overall, the customization options in this tab are excellent, though new WordPress users may need to experiment to figure out what each option does. Take, for example, the header.

Having access to defaults might assist jumpstart your development, however “Inner Header Width” may be a confusing option for those unfamiliar with WordPress.

When you compare this to the process of modifying a header in page builders (even entirely free page builders), you’ll see that Elementor is far superior for beginners.

Furthermore, blog layout tweaking is practically non-existent.

You’ll need to upgrade to the GeneratePress premium edition if you want greater control over how it’s displayed.

Colors

A similar issue exists in the colors tab.

With the GeneratePress premium plugin, you have a lot more possibilities.

It is, however, not a negative feature.

With the help of this tab, you can still build a visual identity for your WordPress site. It allows you to change the colors of key elements such as:

• The color of the site’s backdrop
• The color of the text
• Colored links
• Color of the title of a blog post
• Colors that are hovered over

If you don’t want to worry with building an identity in the early phases of development, the free WordPress theme also contains color presets.

Typography

GeneratePress’ typography section is more advanced than most WP themes’ typography sections (and even most WordPress page builders).

There are approximately 70 fonts available in GeneratePress, including famous Google fonts.

To change the text, you have the standard WP settings like font weight and size, but there’s a lot more.

You can adjust the same details for each heading type in addition to the options for body text editing. This is particularly useful for affiliate sites.

You can offer your site extra flair and an identity that sticks out in each blog piece with comprehensive personalization like this.

Menus

The menu tab is unremarkable. It allows you to customize the menu locations, footer menu, and main menu in your site’s header:

This page allows you to rearrange and add new menu items, as well as links to your various site areas and off-site accounts.

Thrive Products are easy to pair with.

Furthermore, we discovered that GeneratePress is naturally compatible with the other tools you use. We had Thrive installed on the site where we tested GeneratePress, and there was an option to display it in the Thrive-generated footer under the footer menu:

If you already use Thrive products, this is a wonderful deal. It will allow you to customize your entire theme and site much more quickly.

Widgets

You can edit your header, footer, sidebar, and top bar using the widgets menu.

Individual footer widgets, as you can see, receive greater attention from the platform.

This is largely due to the fact that footers have developed to include a variety of content, such as policies, site links, and links to off-platform accounts.

There’s nothing too out of the ordinary to discuss here, as there is with meals.

It’s a straightforward technique for adding widgets to your website.

The widgets, on the other hand, are a delight.

Not only does GeneratePress offer a wide range of features, such as calendars, WP meta data, archives, and audio, but it also works seamlessly with both Thrive Architect elements:

In addition to Elementor widgets:

This is a wonderful time to discuss integrations because they aren’t all sunshine and roses.

While GeneratePress free offers a few integrations (and many more if you upgrade to GeneratePress premium, such as ecommerce and e-learning integrations), they pale in contrast to the number of integrations available in traditional page builders.

You could be better off with a different theme or a GP-page builder combo if you’re looking to develop a website with dozens of tools.

Settings for the Home Page

You may also customize your home page in the GP customization panel, just like you can in most other WordPress theme customization editors:

It’s not a lot, so you’ll need a third-party program to customize your homepage to your liking.

When you’re just getting started and all you care about is getting your content indexed, it can be a fantastic temporary solution.

CSS Expansion

The extra CSS tab allows you to code changes to your site’s layout. If you’re a beginner who hasn’t mastered CSS, it’s not a significant advantage.

However, if you know your way around code and want more control over the look and structure of your site, it can be a huge help.

Other Characteristics and Features

The frontend of GeneratePress includes a lot of customization options. They manage to provide a reasonable level of control (albeit not quite enough on its own), while maintaining a light structure, quick loading times, and an acceptable learning curve.

GeneratePress offers a few extra notable features in addition to what’s on the frontend:

It’s updated on a regular basis to keep up with WordPress updates.

Because of its mobile-friendly design, you won’t have to worry about responsiveness. A fast check will typically suffice, and if you disable elements for mobile devices, you can always change things around.

It’s SEO-friendly, so you may use it for an authoritative site that wishes to rank well in search results.

You can change the background picture, deactivate items on the page, add custom code, and make changes to the mobile header to make it more responsive.

GeneratePress, on the other hand, has another trick up its sleeve. Its fast performance is one of the reasons it could be the best WordPress theme.

Performance of GeneratePress

GeneratePress is extremely lightweight, taking up only 60KB on the server, as we mentioned earlier. This helps it to load quickly, increasing your audience’s experience on your site as well as your authority in Google’s eyes.

• But how quickly is it?
• How does it stack up against other themes?
• Let’s have a look.

We put GeneratePress up against two other popular WordPress themes, OceanWP and Astra, to see how fast it is. We had a website in progress at the time of writing this post, with the structure drawn out but not too many elements on each page. This is the website where the tests were conducted.

Performance of GeneratePress

This is a good loading time for a site with a general structure but no loading time optimizations.

Performance of the Astra Theme

Overall, the site ran slightly better, but the structure is noticeably worse, and the amount of time blocked by scripts has increased dramatically.

Performance of the Ocean WordPress Theme:

This was disappointing to see as a fan of OceanWP, but it only goes to demonstrate that GeneratePress is the finest WordPress theme for keeping your site’s backend clean. It’s also the quickest WordPress theme.

Is GeneratePress Really Free?

Although the free version of GeneratePress is adequate, it appears that you will be missing out on some capabilities if you do not upgrade to GeneratePress premium.

Is the GeneratePress premium theme sufficient to design your full site without the use of additional tools such as page builders?

Is this versatile theme up to the task?

To learn more, keep reading our GeneratePress review.

What Does The Premium Version Include?

With dozens of new features, GeneratePress Premium is a significant upgrade to the free GeneratePress theme.

A theme builder, a site library, greater blog customization, and a slew of additional fancy tools are among the GeneratePress premium modules.

Here’s what we think of GeneratePress: it’s a useful tool, but definitely not enough for everyone.

Let’s look at each element and see why it’s important, as well as who can gain the most from it.

How to Begin Using GeneratePress Premium

We made a mistake by attempting to use GeneratePress premium modules as a theme.

When we attempted to install GeneratePress premium for the first time, we were greeted with this screen.

You’ll need to upload GP premium as a new plugin to properly install it.

After that, you’ll be able to activate it and access its modifying settings in the Appearance tab.

Because there are so many paid modules, it’s fantastic that the developer took the effort to write excellent documentation.

If you wish to use GeneratePress, we strongly advise you to read the manual. The content is well-organized and will assist you in getting started with the plugin.

Theme Builder for GeneratePress

You receive full access to the theme’s code with GP Premium. As long as the user knows how to code or can hire someone who can, this provides them complete control over the layout and different items on their site.

You don’t have to utilize this code playground to make modifications, though.

Custom CSS changes can also be made in the Theme Editor page, which we previously looked at in the free version.

The difference today is that each tab and customization option has additional options for you to experiment with.

For example, the blog layout part is significantly more detailed.

Overall, the new GeneratePress theme builder tools allow you to add more flavor to your site, allowing you to design something unique and attractive. However, some CSS expertise is required to fully utilize it.

Library on the Web

There are two purposes for the GeneratePress Site library.

First, it demonstrates how GP Premium may be used and what it can accomplish.

Second, it allows you to install a pre-built website on your own platform and use it as a template to build your own. This is a big benefit because it speeds up development and eliminates the need for novice users to cope with a blank canvas.

Unfortunately, when we tried to check it out, we ran into a roadblock.

If you click on “Why?” you’ll see a support article.

”. It explains why this problem appears on occasion and suggests refreshing the page.

That worked in our case, and we were allowed to browse GP’s site library.

The templates are varied, and the sites you may build with them are attractive.

Having this in your site-building toolkit, despite certain technical limitations, is a huge benefit.

System of Hooks

GeneratePress includes its own child theme replacement system.

The hook system allows you to add dynamic elements to a page, which may subsequently be customized further by adding any element on top of them.

Create a new element to gain access to it:

And assigning a value to it as a hook:

This effectively allows you to develop your own shortcodes for adding items to your pages using CSS.

While it may be inconvenient for global features such as headers and footers, it’s a fantastic way to spice up your affiliate blog content.

You can, for example, develop custom CTAs for the products you promote and just paste the shortcode into your articles whenever a new commercial post is published.

Furthermore, as you may have observed, it is natively integrated with the Thrive suite, making GP Premium incredibly useful if you currently use Thrive goods.

Support

As you’ve probably noticed, GP Premium offers excellent assistance, including extensive and informative documentation as well as excellent support for common issues.

Most people will have enough tools to get the most out of GP, it’s safe to say.

However, because GeneratePress is primarily the work of a single individual, don’t anticipate corporate-level technical assistance.

Sending a ticket or starting a thread in a support forum is the only way to receive help with particular issues.

It’s fantastic to be able to contact someone if you have any issues, but it’s not as beneficial as live chat.

Pricing

GP Premium offers a reasonable pricing structure. A one-year membership to the tool costs $59, while a lifetime subscription costs $249.

Both versions come with a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can give the lightweight WordPress theme a try without worrying about wasting money if it doesn’t meet your demands.

Furthermore, the application can be placed on over 500 websites, implying that it can be used on a limitless number of websites.

To get a sense for how GeneratePress works, you can install the free GeneratePress theme. It’s too barebones, in our opinion, to demonstrate how GP Premium modules work.

Is a Page Builder Still Necessary?

GP Premium is a fantastic tool for creating great websites.

Is it, however, sufficient to substitute a page builder?

The quick answer is yes if you know CSS. Premium users get access to all of the tools they’ll need to personalize their website and turn it into something spectacular.

It is not, however, the best tool for everyone.

You’ll be better off using a page builder like Elementor, Thrive Architect, or Divi if you can’t make the most of its hook system.

Most of them offer the same level of customization in a more user-friendly interface, as well as drag-and-drop editing.

In terms of GeneratePress’s free edition, you won’t get much use out of it.

It’s a good free theme, and it’s a great choice because of its strong performance.

However, if you want to make a stunning site, you’ll need to either upgrade to GP premium or use a separate page builder. Don’t forget to check out GeneratePress’s demo site if you want to see it in action.

Conclusion

GeneratePress is a fantastic theme, filled with all of the features you’d expect from a free theme while being lightweight.

The commercial edition of GeneratePress adds a lot of functionality to this basic design, making it a fantastic combination for building beautiful websites.

You’ll need to buy a page builder on the side if you don’t know your way around a CSS playground. If you’re still undecided, read our Elementor, Divi Builder, or Thrive Architect reviews.

You may also like

• We set up a new home office for permanent remote work — here are the 8 purchases that helped me create my ideal workspace
• Google’s Pixel 5a 5G is the perfect phone for anyone looking to spend under $500
• 7 reasons why ‘Hades’ is my favorite game included with Xbox Game Pass right now
• Types of Dishwashers: Which Style is Right for You?
• Best Home Décor Tips for Lighting
• 10 Ways to Boost Your Wi-Fi Signal