GeneratePress is the WordPress theme used by Moreton Bay Websites when building and managing websites with the WordPress Hosting Packages.
WordPress is a great system to build websites with and its popularity as the worlds most used content management system is an indicator of how much its popularity has spread.
One of the reasons WordPress is popular is the choice of themes and plugins available. The extensive choice gives the ability to create almost any features you want your website to have.
The downside of the extensive choice is it can be difficult to choose what is best. It isn’t just about the features offered. The website has to work well for users and efficiently for SEO.
When looking for a theme we wanted to make sure it ran fast. We also wanted a theme that is well supported and regularly updated. The theme needed to be flexible and work well with plugins to allow designs to work easily.
GeneratePress Theme
GeneratePress is a free lightweight theme available from the WordPress theme library. At first, it looks like a simple and bland theme but behind its basic impressions is lurking a blazing fast and flexible theme.
With over 2 million downloads and more than 200,000 active websites, GeneratePress is one of the most popular themes available.
GeneratePress is one of the fastest themes around. It isn’t loaded full of features you won’t use that slows down your website. Instead, you can add in the features you need as you need them.
Most of the features are customisable through the WordPress Theme Customizer, supports the Gutenberg editor introduced in WordPress 5, and is compatible with almost everything you through at it. I haven’t come across anything incompatible with GeneratePress directly, it is typically an issue between other plugins.
One of the secrets to GeneratePress’s great compatibility is it is clean from dependencies. Some themes require various plugins to work, sublicensed components that may or may not work with other plugins you add to it.
GeneratePress is so clean it doesn’t even require jQuery, it uses plain vanilla javascript. They follow WordPress coding standards further ensuring maximum compatibility with other plugins.
GeneratePress Premium
GeneratePress doesn’t have a premium theme, instead, they have a Premium plugin installed into WordPress. The plugin works closely with the GeneratePress theme providing additional configuration and features to get amazing control over your website.
Keeping with the minimalist approach to maximise speed and efficiency, the premium features are optionally selected. You only need to activate the features needed, leaving behind the features that are not.
Modules include backgrounds, blog, colours, copyright, disable elements, elements, menu, secondary navigation, page header, sections, spacing, and typography. There is also features for WooCommerce if the WooCommerce plugin has been installed.
Elements is a powerful module, using hooks to insert custom designs into parts of the WordPress system. The hooks run on a simple display rules system, so they apply to an individual page, types of pages, the entire website, and more.
The Elements Header feature allows for beautiful page hero heading images to be added, a design that is popular for many modern websites.
Disable Elements does the opposite, letting you remove an element from a WordPress page, useful when creating landing pages or disabling features when using a custom page builder.
GeneratePress Theme
GeneratePress Premium is a simple yet powerful theme and plugin combination, with immense flexibility and compatibility with other plugins. It runs fast and does its part in keeping the size of the webpages to a smaller size.
GeneratePress may have a longer learning period than some of the other full featured themes, however, it doesn’t lock you into doing things in a set way either. It fits the criteria we set better than any other theme and it is why we use GeneratePress and the Premium plugin as the default theme at Moreton Bay Websites.
Disclosure: This article includes an affiliate link for GeneratePress. If you go through them and make a purchase, Moreton Bay Websites will earn a commission without any change of cost to you. Keep in mind that I link this company because I believe in and use their products, not because of the commission I receive from your purchases.