Why I use the theme GeneratePress for all my sites

Screen capture from the GeneratePress website

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Picking your theme is an important step in creating your website because it impacts not only the look and feel of your website, but also its loading time. Most non-designers will go on ThemeForest or another such platform and pick a theme that is closest in look and feel to what they are aiming for. I used to do that too, but I now think it’s a mistake.

Table of contents

Here’s what I look for in a theme and why I feel GeneratePress is the best theme out there:

A fast and lightweight theme

My first criterion in selecting a theme is not its looks—this can be controlled later—it’s its ability to offer a fast-loading website. Too often in the past I’ve chosen a theme that looks great but ends up slowing down my site due to bad coding or some heavy page builder.

So, what makes a theme fast and lightweight? First, a theme should be simple and not try to do everything. Second, it should be well coded. This means that HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP should be kept clean and minimal and that HTTP requests should be kept to a minimum. GeneratePress excels in both these areas. Its main selling point is actually that it is the fastest and lightest theme out there. They explain how they do this here. Since it is so lightweight, when you first install your free GeneratePress theme, you may be a bit disappointed because unlike the all-in-one themes, it won’t look great from the get-go. But GeneratePress does have a few tricks up its sleeve (more on that in the Customizable section).

A note on page builders: A page builder is a theme component or plugin that, when activated on a page, replaces the WordPress editor to add some drag and drop design tools. But in 2022, with the WordPress block editor and all the useful third-party blocks out there, I don’t feel there is still a need for a page builder. Many people go for page builders like Beaver Builder, Divi, Visual Composer, Elementor or the all-in-one themes like Avada or Enfold; but the truth is they add bulk and clutter to your website, and my clients always end up struggling with… the page builders themselves! Not only that, but if you use a page builder and decide you don’t want it anymore, your content is stuck in that builder, so you’ll have to take it all out of the builder and reintegrate it where (I feel) it belongs: in the WordPress block editor.

So you get it—I don’t like page builders. But for those of you who love them, you’ll be happy to know that GeneratePress is compatible with Beaver Builder, Elementor and other page builders.

An accessible theme

Your website should be accessible to all, including people with auditory, cognitive, neurological, physical, speech, and visual disabilities. Not only is it the right thing to do, but it is now the law in many countries. Back in 2017, with the release of GeneratePress 2.0, the GeneratePress team stated the following:

GeneratePress has been reviewed for accessibility and passed all of their tests. We can now say that the theme is 100% accessible!

Now, that doesn’t mean your site is 100% accessible. You can still make mistakes as you add content and images and pick your colours and plugins, so you should check your site using an accessibility evaluation tool. But GeneratePress is it definitely a good starting point.

A customizable theme

I first started this article by saying that I don’t select a theme based on how it looks. That may seem strange, because a theme’s function is precisely to control how your site looks. But after installing the free GeneratePress theme, if you go under Appearance > Customize, you’ll be able to control some basic aspects of your site’s container, header, navigation, sidebars, footer, and blog, as well as some of your site’s colours and typography. A lot of themes offer this, so that’s not the best part. But add the GeneratePress premium plugin ($59 annually) and the GenerateBlocks plugin to the mix, and the sky is pretty much the limit, even without any coding skills.

GeneratePress Premium will give you access to a bunch of modules in order to control more elements in the theme customizer section. These include Backgrounds, Blog, Colours, Copyright, Elements, Menu Plus, Secondary Nav, Spacing, Typography, and WooCommerce. More on that in future tutorials!

For more about GenerateBlocks, see 6 essential plugins for every website.

Continuous improvements and stability

Over 4 million users have downloaded the free version of GeneratePress and close to 100 000 have purchased the premium version. This means GeneratePress is continually being improved through feedback of all of its users. No developper creating themes from scratch can count on so much feedback to improve their themes. Not only that, being so focused on quality means the GeneratePress team always takes the time necessary to release well thought-out and stable versions of GeneratePress.

Awesome tech support

Last, but not least, the tech support is great. Sure, you can create pretty much any website you want with GeneratePress without any coding skills, but there will be times when you want to tweak something a bit further, and when that happens, the GeneratePress team will be there for you, even providing you with code you can add to your site to fix your problem or adapt your theme.

Their technical support is forum-based, and someone from their team usually replies within 24 hours. I like the forum-based approach because it becomes a searchable database of all previous issues people have experienced, which I find quite useful.

But isn’t better to have your theme coded from scratch?

Some designers believe a theme should be coded specifically for each site and therefore never use an existing theme as a foundation for clients’ websites. This may sound like a good idea, but in practice:

  • When a theme is coded from scratch, the client is often more dependent on their designer for support because it most likely won’t include all the customization options offered by GeneratePress.
  • Your site won’t be better just because your theme was coded from scratch. In fact, most designers creating themes from scratch don’t make them as fast, lightweight, stable and accessible as GeneratePress.
  • You can still get a custom layout for your website and bring it to life using GeneratePress.
  • Your theme will be more expensive because it will take longer to create. You could instead spend that money to hire a layout artist, do usability testing, creating good content, hire a developer for a custom plugin, etc.

Conclusion

So in short, I use GeneratePress for all my sites because it is fast, lightweight, stable and well coded. It is also accessible, highly customizable, continually being improved thanks to the feedback of thousands of users, and comes with great tech support.

Your turn

Do you use GeneratePress? If so, why? If not, which theme do you use and why? Do you have a theme that was coded from scratch and if so, are you satisfied with it?

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