Last Updated | August 2022

GeneratePress has a strong focus on excellent performance and small, clean code. The theme size is less than 30 kB, the smallest WordPress theme you’ll find. Being the smallest makes it incredibly fast to load and one of the fastest WordPress themes. In this GeneratePress Review, you will find out why it is one of the most popular and highest-rated WordPress themes in the market today. It is a multipurpose theme that can be used to create any website. In the five years since it launched, it has been one of the most stable, feature-rich, fast, and best-supported WordPress themes available.

Overview of GeneratePress

GeneratePress emphasizes the performance of your website, i.e., its speed. It also offers seamless customization options that make GeneratePress the most stable, best-supported, and secure Theme available on WordPress. This WordPress theme lets you customize a site using the native WordPress customizer and interface, eliminating the need to learn a new UI.

That means everyone who knows how to use WordPress already knows how to use GeneratePress Website Builder. Therefore, the GeneratePress Theme of WordPress is a fantastic solution for business-minded WordPress users who aspire to land their site in the initial pages of Google search results.

This Theme offers a powerful modular interface and sophisticated premium extensions for customization. The theme author behind GeneratePress is dedicated to this project and provides excellent support to customers on different channels.

GeneratePress is a prevalent free theme for WordPress with more than 300k active installs. Using this free Theme for your website makes an excellent decision as it is lightweight, fast, and offers fantastic customization and extension options. Compatibility to popular page builder frameworks is built-in so that you can use plugins like Elementor or others without any problems.

Who Should Use GeneratePress?

GeneratePress is a performance-built theme known best for its simplicity, speed, customization capabilities, etc. You can switch to the premium version for extra functions. It will further help you build a perfect business website.

The premium GeneratePress Website Builder offers extensive libraries of starter sites built for all business websites. It has templates for all, including a yoga studio, restaurant, agency, consulting business, etc. Moreover, its simple yet stunning and elegant design makes it a perfect theme for business.

The best thing is that you can easily import those templates and tailor them to your choice. GeneratePress is a block-based theme, and every aspect of this Theme is built on blocks. Hence, it gives both beginners and professionals freedom to create the aspired business website.

My first impression of the GeneratePress Website Builder is fantastic. Even though its default settings look somewhat bland, anyone can quickly transform it to achieve beautiful results. The vast range of customization options and advanced features the GeneratePress Website Builder provides made building the website I envisioned very easy. In this GeneratePress brand review, you will learn everything about GeneratePress Website Builder.

GeneratePress is a lightweight theme that can be extended with a premium pack of extensions. It will work with all page builders and has the most extensive theme documentation. GeneratePress is a powerful theme that focuses on performance. It is the fastest and best Theme at the moment. Its flexibility makes it even better for site owners. Whatever niche you’re opting for, GeneratePress has it for you. You can build your portfolio site, eCommerce, or business site. On top of that, it is free to use.

GeneratePress is best for:

• Bloggers
• Freelancers & Designers
• Agencies

Pros and Cons

Pros:

Cons:

GeneratePress Rating: Breakdown

We use thorough and continuous eCommerce builder testing to properly rank each brand in its expert review. The testing process allows us to check their functionality, assess their work across devices, and evaluate the risks. We use specific parameters that provide the most accurate results to specify the best builders present. Here are the factors we used for the GeneratePress reviews.

Ease Of Use (Is It Easy To Use GeneratePress?)

When you’re a beginner, choosing an easy-to-use WordPress theme is essential. That will keep you motivated to continue working with it. GeneratePress is such a theme that comes with a lot of customization options. That is why it will take a while to go through all the options and find out precisely what each one does.

GeneratePress isn’t a niche-specific theme. Instead, you can call it a multipurpose theme. As it covers a variety of niches, there are too many customization options available. That will make you confused as a beginner or if you have limited time to design a niche-specific site.

But the good news is – things will get easier once you become acquainted with it. After installing the Generatepress Theme, spend a bit of time in the theme customizer options, and you’ll start to see some of the power this Theme offers.

So let’s analyze its features in turn, from the Layout, Colors, and Typography, all the way to custom code additions and other functionalities, to see if it’s easy to use.

• Site Identity

The site identity tab isn’t that different from any other theme. It lets you edit the basic details of your site, like the site title, logo, or tagline.

• Layout

The layout tab is where GeneratePress’ functionalities start to shine.

You can use it to edit custom theme layouts like your header, sidebars, footer, and blog section.

Overall, the customization available in this tab is excellent, though beginner users of WordPress might need some experimentation to figure out what each option does.

• Colors

The colors tab has a similar problem.

There are many more options with the GeneratePress Premium plugin.

However, it’s not a bad feature. You can still create a visual identity for your WordPress site with the help of this tab. It lets you modify the colors of essential elements like:

1. Site background-color
2. Text-color
3. Link color
4. Blog post title color
5. Hover colors

• Typography

The typography tab of GeneratePress is more advanced than what you’d usually find in most WP themes (and even most WordPress page builders).

GeneratePress has over 70 fonts to choose from, including popular Google fonts.

You get the vanilla WP options like font-weight and size to modify the text, but more on top of that.

Besides options for body text editing, you can also modify the exact details for each heading type.

GeneratePress Value for Money – Pricing & Plans

GeneratePress is a freemium theme. You can download the free version directly from WordPress.org. The free version comes with limited features, but it’s good enough for most beginner websites. For additional functions, you’ll have to upgrade to the premium version. And the best thing is that it’s pretty reasonably priced for the functions it provides.

GeneratePress offers you two different pricing schemes, i.e.,  Yearly and Lifetime plans. Using this GeneratePress Review and customer reviews, you will be able to choose the pricing plans. The pricing plans are shown in the table below.

1. Yearly plan: This is the best option for those on a tight budget as it costs you just $59 per year.

2. Lifetime plan: If you want to get access to lifetime updates and support, this plan is just for you, which costs you $249, a one-time payment.

If you are looking for a theme that can help you get started on your blogging journey without the need to customize every minor detail on your website, then the free version of GeneratePress is adequate for you.

So it’s safe to say that you’ll want the premium modules. For $59, you get all 14 modules, can use it on up to 500 sites, and one year of support and updates. It’s definitely worth the money. Or, if you want to save even more money long term, you can get their lifetime deal for $249. You can also upgrade from the yearly plan to the lifetime plan.

Templates (Design Flexibility)

Choosing GeneratePress is an excellent way to start with WordPress.

The free version of GeneratePress offers many options for customization and can get you pretty far with your website. You can adjust sizes, layouts, colors, add custom logos and images, and much more. If you don’t feel like customizing, the premium version of GeneratePress has plenty of pre-designed site templates ready to get started. Just import and activate the preferred template. Your website will have the template’s same look and feel.

Site Library is the most exciting feature of the GeneratePress Theme.

With the GeneratePress Site Library feature, you can import the ready-made designed website layout to your website. It will enable you to save your time and help you get the best-designed layout and customization in one click. Here are some stunning examples out of their site library:

The marketer is best among all the prebuilt demo libraries by GeneratePress if you think of building an affiliate site quickly. It is specially created for writers and affiliate marketers.

With this imported demo, you can quickly set up the site, but you may require some customization.

Dispatch is a magazine-style site with custom post styling using WP Show Posts. You can start your affiliate website with a magazine-styled theme too.

When you import a website layout into your website using the site-library feature, it will automatically create some pages, install some plugins, and add some demo content to your website, which you can remove later on as per your requirements.

The templates are diverse, and the sites you can create based on them look good.

You can use the complete site library after buying the premium GeneratePress plugin. You can import the entire library and go live with your site quickly.

Features and Tools

While GeneratePress at its default settings looks somewhat bland, anyone can quickly transform it to achieve beautiful results.

The vast customization options and advanced features make it easy to build the envisioned website.

Elements

The Elements module is the most exciting feature offered by GeneratePress Premium.

With GeneratePress elements, you can add specific codes to your header, footer, or any different sections of your website, add a custom header to particular pages and posts of your website, and change the layout of specific categories of posts or pages of your website, and many more.

GeneratePress Elements is like a miniature page builder for your GeneratePress Theme that allows you to create custom-looking footers, headers, and sidebars for your website. You can also add the GenerateBlocks plugin even to extend the functionality of this feature and take your website to the next level.

It offers you four significant types of elements: Block, Hook, Layout, and Header.

1. Header: You can use the header element to design the site header. You can add background color, add or change text and images, style it, etc. Page Hero is created using CSS and HTML in this element.
2. Hook: This element is one of the most impressive features of the premium version of GeneratePress. This element allows you to add content to the site hook. It eliminates the need to create child themes. It can also be used for better blog customization.
3. Layout: You can use this element to edit the layout for the whole site, or just archives or particular categories, pages, or posts. An advanced form helps style the site just how you want it to appear.
4. Block: This is the most advanced GeneratePress element module. Block Element helps in advance customization using Block Editor instead of using HTML. The GenerateBlocks plugin can be combined with the Block element to make a left and right sidebars, site headers, and footers.

You always have to work within Display Rules when using the Element feature. Elements will need to be assigned before they can be displayed in various categories. You can establish locations between categories, pages, posts, and even entire websites.

WooCommerce Integration

If you’re running an eCommerce store using the WooCommerce plugin (WooCommerce is an open-source eCommerce plugin for WordPress), GeneratePress is a great theme choice. WooCommerce integration helps you to build your e-store on your WordPress site. Moreover, GeneratePress not only integrates with WooCommerce but also enables you to customize your store.

The WooCommerce module provides theme styling options for the Shop and Product Pages. It gives you layout, color, and typography options for your WooCommerce elements.

Once activated, you can customize your eCommerce store however you want.

This module will naturally require you to already have the WooCommerce plugin installed to make changes to your WooCommerce store. It means that you’ll be able to modify everything from the font and spacing between the letters to the specific color you want to use for your menus or text.

GenerateBlocks

GenerateBlocks is an essential plugin for the WordPress block editor (Gutenberg). GenerateBlocks give you four blocks to work within the total. There’s the container, grid, headline, and buttons block. It might not sound like much, but you can do it with just those four blocks.

GenerateBlocks only adds one CSS file per page, containing all of the CSS generated by your options. There is no Javascript or inline CSS – it’s all in one, tidy place.

Another awesome thing is that you can copy/paste a whole page of blocks to a completely different site, which comes across perfectly.

The same team that brought us GeneratePress is also responsible for GenerateBlocks. And GenerateBlocks are perfect for use with the block element part of GeneratePress Premium. Using GenerateBlocks will give you access to four blocks:

1. Container – Organize your content into rows and sections. The Container block is the foundation of your content, allowing you to design unique units for your content.
2. Grid – Create advanced layouts with flexible grids. The Grid block gives you the ability to create any layout you can imagine.
3. Headline – Craft text-rich content with advanced typography. Everything from headings to paragraphs – take complete control of your text.
4. Buttons – Drive conversions with beautiful buttons.

Site Library

The site library is thronged with many beautiful, well-made, eye-catching, and scintillating premade templates. After purchasing the premium version, you will get full access to the site-library. You can import the whole library and make your site live quickly.

These site libraries can be imported with GeneratePress options and demo content. If you have content, then you can skip the demo content. GeneratePress sites use default WordPress Editor, Elementor free or Pro version, and Beaver Builder to create some of the demo sites and content.

The site library on GeneratePress offers many prebuilt sites that you can use as a template for your own. You can later choose to modify these sample sites in small or more drastic ways to fit your personal preferences better or keep them the way they are.

Alternatively, you can go for a more straightforward site design as a template and build your layout from there.

Blog

The blog module is there to help you add a few things to the post you put on your site. It will allow you to add the post date, the author of the post, the category, and specific tags.

You’ll also be able to show the comment count and enable the use of infinite scroll on your page.

Finally, you’ll also be able to include any images in your posts and even place a set requirement for the number of characters that the excerpt should have.

You can customize the featured image, columns, and archive using the Blog Module in the Customizer. The blog module selects and controls options like post date, author, categories, tags, featured images, etc.

Starting in GP Premium 1.5, the blog content layout options are separated for Archives (blog index, categories, archives, and tag pages) and Single (single posts) by using the toggle button.

The content options for Archives are:

• Content-Type – Choose whether your blog/archives display the full content of the posts or the excerpts.
• Excerpt word count – Set the length of excerpts.
• Read more label – Set the text of your read more link when excerpts are set.
• You can display read more as a button – Add button style to the read more label.
• Display post date – Show or remove the post date.
• Display post author – Show or remove the post author.
• Display post categories – Show or remove the post categories.
• Display post tags – Show or remove the post tags.
• Display comment count – Show or remove the link to the post’s comments.
• Use infinite scroll – Activate or disable the unlimited scroll feature.
• Use button to load more posts – Choose to load posts automatically or manually with a load more button when the infinite scroll is activated.
• Load more label – Set the text of the load more button when it’s activated.
• Loading label – Set the text that appears while new posts are loading.

The content options for single are: Single

• Display post date – Show or remove the post date.
• Display post author – Show or remove the post author.
• Display post categories – Show or remove the post categories.
• Display post tags – Show or remove the post tags.
• Display post navigation – Show or remove the post navigations.

SEO Tools

SEO stands for search engine optimization, a set of practices designed to improve the appearance and positioning of web pages in organic search results. Because organic search is the most prominent way for people to discover and access online content, a good SEO strategy is essential for improving the quality and quantity of traffic to your website.

• Schema Microdata – Schema markup (schema.org) is a structured data vocabulary that helps search engines better understand your website’s info to serve rich results. These markups allow search engines to see the meaning and relationships behind entities mentioned on your site. Schema.org has a comprehensive vocabulary that includes defined microdata tags for most forms of content. Schema markups are commonly used to indicate: Articles, Events, Products, People, Organizations, Local Businesses, Reviews, Recipes, and Medical conditions. Adding these markups to your site allows a search engine to understand what your site is about. The search engine is then able to showcase this information via Rich Snippets. These markups can be implemented using different code languages, including RDFa, Microdata, and JSON-LD.
  • RDFa stands for Resource Descriptive Framework in Attributes. It is a form of code that can be added to any HTML, XHTML, and XML-based document.
  • Microdata is a specification language embedded within HTML content to improve machine readability, annotate elements, and analyze web pages.
  • JSON-LD stands for Javascript Object Notation for Linked Objects. This annotation style can implement schema by pasting directly in a web document’s <head> or <body> tag.

If you are serious about ranking your website in Google and driving more free traffic, you need a plugin designed specifically for SEO.

Many plugins for SEO will work with GeneratePress, but the three best SEO plugins are Yoast SEO, SEOPress, and Rankmath.

• Yoast SEO Plugin – Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that helps your site perform better in search engines like Google. It also gives you the tools to bring your content to the highest SEO standards and overall readability. Once installed on your WordPress site, the Yoast SEO plugin will appear on each page and post you create. Yoast SEO analyzes the page’s content and provides suggestions on how to improve it. The plugin gives you a score and tells you what problems are and how to improve your content for SEO.
  
  Tip

  Tip: Coupling this plugin with a keyword and content strategy is the recipe for reaching that number one spot on search results.
• SEOPress – SEOPress is a WordPress plugin designed to make the highly complex job of climbing the SERPs easier. Along with the likes of Yoast and SEMrush, the plugin tries to collect all the fundamental elements of SEO and organize them into a series of menus within a single plugin. The SEOPress plugin is a great way to optimize your website for internet search engines. It has a free and paid version, and each provides you with comprehensive reports about your site’s performance and tells you what needs to be done to improve it. The plugin also offers instructions on using it, so even beginners can learn to use it immediately.
• Rankmath – Rankmath is a Search Engine Optimization plugin for WordPress that makes it easy for anyone to optimize their content with built-in suggestions based on widely-accepted best practices. Easily customize basic SEO settings, control which pages are indexable, and how you want your website to appear in search with Structured data.
  Note

  Note: Rank Math is the first and only SEO plugin that uses AI to help you write content.

BuddyPress

BuddyPress is a free software package that can be plugged into WordPress to create a social networking website. For newcomers, think of BuddyPress as an out-of-the-box social networking website, complete with an administration area that lets you manage the site. BuddyPress helps site builders & developers add community features to their websites. It comes with a robust theme compatibility API that does its best to make every BuddyPress content page look and feel right with just about any WordPress theme.

Performance

GeneratePress is one of the most lightweight and fastest themes in the market.

We’ve performed several speed tests on a freshly installed WordPress site hosted in a shared hosting environment. It is the environment most people will use it in. You can expect even better results if you use managed hosting on a VPS.

No plugins are activated by default, except for the GP Premium for GeneratePress.

GeneratePress’ performance is blazing fast compared to other themes, even on a shared hosting server. Even after activating all modules, there’s only a slight difference in the results, giving it a clear advantage in speed compared to features available.

The performance decline is not noticeable in a live environment, especially if you consider the massive set of features that you gain in exchange for the slight decrease.

Speed Page

There’s no other way to say it. GeneratePress is one of the most lightweight and fastest themes. Every click, transition, and edit. To prove this, I checked out the platform’s speed with GTMetrix, which measures site speed and platform optimization.

A score and “92%” on performance are excellent. The website takes only 641 ms to load fully, which is quite fast, and it takes 410 ms to be fully interactive and load the most visible elements, which is an outstanding result.

Uptime and Response Time

To test GeneratePress’s uptime, I ran an automated check on a website every five minutes for seven days to ensure it was still up. There was no point where the website was unavailable. GeneratePress performed very well in the response time testing. Of course, the average speed of your website will also depend on the features that your Theme has.

Based on the tests and the results, the overall ranking for performance is 9.7.

Help and Customer Support

Compared to other themes, GeneratePress probably has the best support and documentation.

GeneratePress offers free support (even for free theme users) where you can ask any question related to GeneratePress to solve your queries. You can directly log into your account to post a topic to receive responses quickly if you’re a premium user. Most of the customer reviews are positive.

When it comes to theme customization, documentation plays a key role. GeneratePress offers a vast knowledge base where you’ll find documentation for every template. No matter what GeneratePress template you want to customize, you’ll find plenty of helpful resources and documentation for it.

Speaking of support, theirs is one of (if not) the best. Everyone gets the same quality of help and support from free to premium users.

You will surely not get stuck with something with GeneratePress.

The simplest way is to use Google. The staff at GeneratePress are very active on many different review sites and forums, meaning that as long as you search for the exact problem you’re having, you’re very likely to come across an answer from one of the members of staff very quickly.

The more direct approach is to visit the GeneratePress support forum directly. The forum is where all users and creators post their solutions to the problems you might be experiencing with the Theme. It’s well organized, each answer is time-stamped, and it’s straightforward to find specific issues using the search bar. Additionally, you can also visit the WordPress forums as well. GeneratePress is a trendy theme, so there will likely be at least a few posts about it a day.

GeneratePress Example Sites

GeneratePress is a simple, lightweight WordPress theme. GeneratePress is one of the best WordPress themes on the market. It’s simple but powerful and optimized for mobile, allowing you to customize the look and functionality of your site exactly how you want it. Below are a few examples of websites created with GeneratePress.

Sleepopolis (Mattress Review Website)

Sleepopolis.com is a successful mattress review site built on GeneratePress Premium.

Sleepopolis is an incredible example of how to design and structure an affiliate site. Its simple layout emphasizes the content, and the straightforward navigation helps people find the categories they want. The clean color palette makes pages easy to scan, and it’s a friendly site to browse.

12MinuteAthlete (Online Fitness Website)

12MinuteAthlete.com is a very successful fitness website run by California-based athlete Krista Stryker.

12 Minute Athlete looks and feels like an expensive custom site, and it uses GeneratePress Premium very well to achieve this effect. Using the custom colors pro feature (white and bright red) and bold page sections, 12 Minute Athlete looks consistent while promoting various content types – a blog, app, recipes, workout routines, and even a store. The site also uses the Thrive Leads plugin to optimize for email subscriptions.

TheHealthyApron (Health and Fitness Blog)

TheHealthyApron.com is a health and fitness blog.

The Healthy Apron is a clean and well-organized blog emphasizing straightforward typography and links to related posts. The homepage is a landing page designed using Thrive Architect. Still, the rest of the site uses GeneratePress’s features, including Google Ads blocks, and makes additional revenue by converting traffic to the Amazon affiliate program.

GeneratePress Review: Summary

GeneratePress is a fast-loading, multipurpose theme with freemium features. The free version of GeneratePress is enough to get you started with your blogging journey. It’s a well-known theme for its simplicity among WordPress users. Your website loads pretty well without slowing down with this Theme. It’s an ideal WordPress theme that focuses on performance without compromising functionality and design. GeneratePress is quick and straightforward to get started, and as the Theme is trendy, there are tons of tutorials available to help you design your site with this Theme. Even there is a very active forum on the GeneratePress site, and they offer email support to guide you through the process.

GeneratePress is a choice to consider when you want to focus on building a simple content website. The premium version of the Theme also supports page builder plugins and offers enhanced customization options.

GeneratePress User Reviews

You don’t have to look for testimonials and GeneratePress reviews elsewhere.

By browsing their support forum and WordPress help forum, you can find customer reviews and see how they helped users with their problems and how happy they were. You can see that their users are delighted.

Furthermore, you can count on the fingers of your hands the number of non-5-star GeneratePress reviews in the repository. Everyone recommends it, from casual users to developers, and most of them even call it “the number one theme for WordPress.”

Another glowing review is from Brian Jackson, who is the CMO at Kinsta and also runs the blog Workup. Users are satisfied with GeneratePress’s ease of use and ever-growing, progressive learning curve, so we mentioned it in this GeneratePress brand review. It is mainly with the support of the fantastic team at GeneratePress and the great templates they have to learn that users have been able to build websites progressively. GeneratePress offers a vast knowledge base where you’ll find documentation for every template. No matter what GeneratePress template you want to customize, you’ll find plenty of helpful resources and documentation for it.