GeneratePress Review : Is It REALLY the Best Theme Out There? (2024)

GeneratePress is a lightweight WordPress theme designed for peformance, simplicity and great usability. It has a free version which is very popular and a premium version to offer extended functions. The theme has a very light footprint of just 7.5KB and 2 HTTP requests and scores 100% on all PageSpeed scores.

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GeneratePress Review Summary

GeneratePress has a strong focus on excellent performance and small, clean code. The theme size is less than 30 kB, which is the smallest WordPress theme you'll find. This makes it incredibly fast to load and one of the fastest WordPress themes out there.

Overall	5/5
Features	5/5
Ease of use	5/5
Performance	5/5
Support	5/5
Value for money	5/5
Price	From free, Premium starts at $59/year
Free Trial	No, but the core theme is free
Pros	Ease of use - getting up and running is very simple. The theme allows you to activate modules which you need and customize them using the built-in theme customizer, including colors, layouts and typography.
	Performance – The theme performs excellently even with all modules active, 100% Pagespeed scores and a minimal footprint. GeneratePress of the fastest WordPress themes available.
	Quality site templates / site library – 100 starter sites and 200 patterns so that you don't have to design and define everything from scratch but can start from a solid base and customize as necessary, making your projects faster and more efficient.
	Price – The core theme is free and is a solid foundation, while the premiun premium theme starts at $59/year for up to 500 sites giving you an excellent ROI. GenerateBlocks, the pagebuilder which complements GeneratePress costs $99/year.
	Customization – Extensive customization options, for anything and everything you need. Using modules, you can activate only what you need keeping the theme lean and free of bloat.
Cons	Sole developer – Sole developers without the backing of a largish company have a small inherent risk.
	No real-time support channels such as phone or chat.
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GeneratePress Background

GeneratePress is one of the most popular themes out there right now. Its rating in the WordPress repository is one of the highest, with 1391 reviews giving it a 5-star rating and it has 600,000+ active installs and more than 5,800,000 downloads (at the time of writing).

It is a multipurpose theme that can be used to create any kind of website. In the years since it launched, it has been one of the most stable, feature-rich, fastest and best-supported WordPress themes available.

GeneratePress is one of the few themes that still allows you to customize a site using the native WordPress customizer and interface, eliminating the need to learn a new UI just to use the theme.

Have a look at the following video by Derek Pierce of using the GeneratePress theme:

You can still use a page builders to build your site since it’s fully compatible with the majority of popular page builders. It seems that most users opt-in to Beaver Builder and Elementor, with the latter being the more popular choice. You can also use the native pagebuilder, GenerateBlocks.

The theme comes in two flavors, free and premium, with some additional options. The premium version comes with several additional modules. To use these modules, you will need to purchase a license for a plugin called “GeneratePress Premium”, which then needs to be installed and activated.

Its strength is that it can thoroughly be customized to look very different from its base appearance. It can rival even those that were made using page builders like Elementor, Beaver Builder and Divi (check out our reviews), and our Elementor vs Divi comparison.

Believe it or not, this is built using only GeneratePress Premium

Building pages can be sped up by activating the site-library module. With the module activated, you can select and import pre-built templates or site libraries to jumpstart your project.

The image above is one of the pre-built site templates that you can import to your site.

Incidentally, at CollectiveRay, we constantly review WordPress themes and create roundups with them. You can find plenty of more themes for WordPress on this site.

GeneratePress Performance

GeneratePress is one of the lightest and fastest themes in the market.

We’ve performed several speed tests on a freshly installed WordPress site hosted in a shared hosting environment. This is the environment most people will use it on.

You can expect even better results if you use managed hosting on a VPS.

There are no plugins activated by default, except for the GP Premium for GeneratePress. We’ve tested the site via GTMetrix with the testing server set to Vancouver Canada.

First, here’s the result with only GeneratePress and GP Premium active. No modules are activated.

It loaded in just over half than a second. Keep in mind that this is an actual site, not an empty / fresh installation.

We performed several other tests, whose results we kept out of this article for brevity. 

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

The performance drop is NOT noticeable in a live environment, especially if we consider the massive set of features that we gain in exchange for the small drop.

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It's a great mix of flexibility, power and price that you won't find often.

Click here to see SiteGround offers in July 2024

GeneratePress Features

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

The huge range of customization options and advanced features that it offers makes it very easy to build the website you envision.

In this section, we’re going to deep dive into the features and modules and what you can do with them.

We’re not going to give you an in-depth walkthrough of everything since their documentation already does it perfectly.

We’re still going to ensure that you can have a good idea and overview of what you can expect when GeneratePress Premium.

GeneratePress Customizer including GenerateBlocks 

The GeneratePress customizer is built into WordPress’s default customizer, so you don’t need to learn anything new in terms of the user interface.

The customizer contains most of the things you need to alter the appearance of your site.

Here, you can access the settings for colors, typography, layout, widgets, background images and other customization and layout options for almost all elements of your site.

There’s also a unique WooCommerce customization section. This will appear if you have WooCommerce installed and activated and if the WooCommerce module from GeneratePress is also activated.

We won't go through this, because most of it is just standard WordPress customizer functionality.

The GenerateBlocks plugin you get with GeneratePress Premium adds even more flexibility.

It also integrates with the block editor and uses the traditional block menu and a new set of menu in the Block menu on the right of the edit window.

Once you get used to how it all works, the GenerateBlocks plugin is very intuitive to use.

Here's a video of it in action.

Recentlly, GeneratePress have built in a Customization page, which is basically just a bunch of shortcuts to the various GeneratePress options.

GeneratePress Premium Modules

Instead of diving deep into every premium module, we’re going to give you an overview of them since the documentation already covers each module thoroughly.

GeneratePress has the following premium modules:

• Backgrounds
• Blog
• Colors
• Copyright
• Disable Elements
• Elements
• Menu Plus
• Secondary Nav
• Sections
• Site Library
• Spacing
• Typography
• WooCommerce

Backgrounds

This module enables background image customization. This will let you configure background options for all eligible elements of your site.

Every element comes with a slightly different background image option.

Blog

Activating the blog module lets you access advanced layout controls.

For example, you will be able to control the visibility of the post author, date, tags, category and so on.

There’s also an option that lets you choose whether to display an excerpt or not and how many characters the excerpt should have if you choose to enable it, along with many other layout and display options for your blog posts and blog page.

Colors

The colors module enables the advanced color options that we discussed earlier.

Copyright

The copyright module lets you change the copyright message displayed in the footer of your site. WordPress now also has this feature GeneratePress has you covered too.

Disable Elements

We’ve already seen this is a powerful module earlier in the layouts control section. This module is the one that lets you disable specific elements on a certain post or page.

You can access this by selecting the layout options on a post or page and then selecting the Disable Elements option.

Just check which elements you want to disable, save the post or page and you’re done.

Elements

This is one of the most powerful modules GeneratePress has to offer. It lets you add advanced tweaks and customizations to your site with ease.

Advanced users and developers are the ones who will mostly use this module and its features, but casual users can also benefit from it.

There are three types of elements: Header, Hook and Layout.

1. Header elements let you add a custom header. You can build a custom header using HTML and CSS.
2. Hook elements let you insert content to any available hook on your site. This is a powerful feature that lets advanced users and developers customize the site’s output without the need to use a child theme.
3. Layout elements are another way to apply a certain style of layout to a specific post, page, or parts of your site. We’ve glanced this earlier in the Layout Control section; this is the third way of controlling your layout.

Every element has a display rule that you can configure. For your elements to work or display anywhere, you must set conditions on the display rule.

You can select to display an element on your entire site or only on specific pages, posts, categories and tags.

Menu Plus

Activating this module lets you configure additional options for sticky navigation, mobile menu, mobile header, off-canvas panel and other menu options.

Secondary Nav

Adds a secondary menu location to a page.

Sections

Activating the section module gives access to a mini page builder. Once activated, you will have the ability to enable or disable sections on a post or page.

Activating the Sections option replaces the default editor with a panel that lets you add and arrange sections. It will also remove the sidebars.

Clicking on the Add Section button will let you add a new section block.

You can configure your section blocks by using HTML and CSS. A skilled web designer can make lightweight pages that rival page builders using this feature.

You can take advantage of plugins like TinyMCE Advanced to extend the section block’s content editor’s functionalities. This will help you create better blocks with ease.

Each section block has its settings where you can configure the block’s layout, color, background and custom CSS options.

Spacing

This module adds additional spacing and padding options in the customizer. This is very useful when you're trying to fine tune layouts.

Typography

This module activates additional typography options that we discussed earlier.

WooCommerce

The WooCommerce module can only be activated if you have it installed and activated. It lets you control your WooCommerce store, product and checkout pages’ layout, color and typography settings, which you already saw in the customizer section above.

We’ve gone through the available modules and features in GeneratePress. While we’ve barely touched the surface in terms of actual functionality, you now have a complete overview of everything in the theme.

If you want to learn more about them, you can always check out their documentation. 

Site Library

The site library module enables access to hundreds of pre-made site templates. You might want to have a look at the below video overview of the Site Library which is a good and easy walk through of what the Site Library offers.

These templates can help you get started with building a website very quickly since it includes basic pages and demo content.

There is a filter that lets you select templates that are built with either Elementor, Beaver Builder. The rest of the themes are built with either Gutenberg or GenerateBlocks.

Selecting a template will let you view its details, such as what plugins were used.

You can also configure whether to import the demo content or not. The image above shows a template that doesn’t use a page builder.

You can see how the template author utilized a combination of GeneratePress’s built-in features and external plugins to produce an excellent looking site.

Check out the full Site Library

Site Library Examples

If you’re wondering what kind of templates GeneratePress offers, we’re going to give you a sneak peek at some of the more interesting ones the site-library has.

Different templates have different authors, but all of them are approved by the theme’s developer so you can rest assured that all of them are high quality and conformant to the theme.

1. Prime

The first one is the Prime template by LH Consulting. It looks very similar to Amazon. If you want to start an e-commerce site, this could probably be one of the best template choices.

This template uses the following plugins: AJAX Search for WooCommerce, Contact Form 7, MailChimp for WordPress, Simple CSS, Responsive WordPress Slider - Soliloquy Lite, WooCommerce Blocks, and WooCommerce.

Check out the full demo and preview here.

2. Head On

If you want a strong landing page, then Head On by Flint Skin is a good choice. It has a big header landing page with bold type which immediately catches the attention of your visitors.

This template uses very few plugins and is therefore very light: Contact Form 7, Lazy Load for Videos and Lightweight Social icons.

A full demo and preview is available here.

3. Volume

Next, we have the Volume template, again by Flint Skin. It’s a template that was built with content creators in mind. It has a strong focus on readability and cleanliness.

This template uses nothing but GeneratePress premium. You can see the live sample here.

We’ve seen templates that only use the core GeneratePress as its base, but what about ones that use page builders?

Like what you’ve learned earlier, the site-library has templates for the core theme, Elementor and Beaver Builder, so with that in mind, we are also going to check out some of the templates that were built with the help of page builders.

The following templates will be using Elementor. If you are not familiar with this page builder, we've reviewed this plugin fully on CollectiveRay here.

4. Vibe

Perfect for freelancers, agencies, and studios to showcase their services, Vibe by Flint Skin is a site template focusing on giving you the ability to create a beautiful presentation of your work and services.

While it's built with Elementor, the template uses the free version so you don’t have to worry about having to pay for another premium WordPress product to get this look. No other plugins are required. You can visit the live demo here.

5. Uno

The next template, Uno which, again, is crafted by Flint Skin, is an excellent landing page template. That image on the right has a hover animation.

Like the latter template, Uno also uses the free version of Elementor. Check out this sleek theme on the live demo here.

6. Aspire

Aspire by FlixFrame is a site template focusing on helping you showcase your brand. It’s clean and simple.

It uses Elementor Pro and WP Show Posts Pro. Check out this premium template’s demo here.

Next, we’re going to see templates built around GeneratePress and Beaver Builder.

7. Studio

Studio by Paul Lacey is a minimalist template that takes advantage of contrasting colors.

It is quite heavy in terms of plugins, it uses Beaver Builder Plugin (Pro Version), Lightweight Social Icons, MailChimp for WordPress, Menu Icons, PowerPack Lite for Beaver Builder, WP Show Posts plugins to achieve the look.

See it in action in the live demo.

8. Pivot

If you want a corporate style template, Pivot by Mike Oliver is your choice.

Most Beaver Builder based templates are quite heavy, with this one using Google Map, Beaver Builder Plugin (Pro Version), Black Studio TinyMCE Widget, Lightweight Social Icons, MailChimp for WordPress, WP Show Posts plugins to deliver the look.

Check it out the demo here.

9. Branded

Finally, we have the Branded template, again by Paul Lacey. The template author claims that it was designed based on the feedback of actual branding experts.

It uses the least number of plugins compared to other Beaver Builder based templates we saw earlier. To achieve this look, the template author used Beaver Builder Plugin (Pro Version), Menu Icons, PowerPack Lite for Beaver Builder, WP Show Posts plugins.

Check out this professionally built template here.

Support and Documentation

Aside from the excellent performance and features, GeneratePress also comes with excellent support and documentation.

Documentation

This theme probably has the most exhaustive documentation ever.

If you visit https://docs.generatepress.com/, you can find everything you need to know; from installing and updating the GP Premium companion plugin, to using hooks, filters, and adding custom CSS and PHP.

Every topic and module are thoroughly documented down to the very last detail.

Take a look at their Typography module documentation and see how extensive it is. There’s an overview, which contains the basics and general options and there are advanced topics such as customizing Google font list, adding local fonts and others.

Aside from directly browsing the documentation, you can alternately do a Google search of your problem or question and one of the top results will always be a link to the official documentation or their support forum, making it very easy to find what you’re looking for.

Support

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

Remember earlier that you can Google your problems and questions regarding GeneratePress and the top of the SERP is either a link to their official documentation or a link to their support forum?

Try googling the phrases “how to add a custom sidebar generatepress” or “how to add javascript generatepress” without the quotes and you’ll see that the top results are indeed the support forum and documentation.

You can see the quality of their support by browsing the support forum.

When you click the link to the support forum, you can view responses from the staff and Tom himself.

They are very helpful to their users and go the extra mile to help them (the thread in the screenshot was created in late 2015 and still gets a response 4 years later).

Even the support forum at WordPress for the free version is very active and most questions are answered by the team or by Tom very quickly.

You will surely not get stuck with something with GeneratePress.

You can easily find answers to your questions and problems since most of the time, what you’re looking for is in the documentation or has already been answered in the support forum. If those scenarios don’t apply to you, you can easily get an answer to your question or problem by posting in the forum yourself.

GeneratePress Premium

The free version of GeneratePress is pretty good, but limited as you would expect. It’s only when you pay for premium that you unlock its true potential.

GeneratePress Premium opens more design options for the theme builder, access to the full Site Library, the advanced hook system, mobile header options, off-canvas menus, secondary navigation, infinite scroll capabilities, sticky navigation and a whole lot more.

GenerateBlocks Free / Pro

GenerateBlocks, the native pagebuilder of GeneratePress also comes in two flavours, free and Pro.

The core blocks are the basic building blocks of any page, but enough to build a solid site, including:

• Container
• Headline
• Button
• Image
• Grid
• Query Loop.

The Pro blocks brings in advanced blocks such as:

• Pattern library - these are like Site libraries, but for specific pages, where you can access oage layouts that can be your foundational blocks
• Effects - CSS effects for user interface configuration
• Accordions, Tabs - powerful block variations that provider accordion and tabs functionality
• Backgrounds
• Container Links
• Asset Library
• Copy + Paste Styles
• Device Visibility
• Custom Attributes

We will skip the details of each of these blocks since most of them are fairly intuitive, or you can visit the GeneratePress website to learn more about them. 

GeneratePress Theme Builder

With GP Premium, you can see all of the code for the theme. This gives users full control over their website's layout and different parts, as long as they know how to code or hire someone who does. 

But you don't have to make changes in this code playground.

In the Theme Editor screen, which we looked at in the free version, you can even make your own CSS changes.

Now, every tab and customization option has more things you can do with it.

For example, the section on blog layout is a lot more in-depth.

Overall, the new options in the GeneratePress theme builder give your site more personality and help you make something beautiful and unique. To get the most out of it, you will need to know some CSS.

Hook System

Instead of child themes, GeneratePress has its own system.

With the hook system, you can add dynamic elements to a page, which can then have any other element put on top of them to make the page even more unique.

To get to it, you have to make a new element and set its value as hook. This means that you can almost make your own CSS shortcodes to add things to your pages.

It could be a pain for global elements like headers and footers, but it's a great way to spice up your blog posts.

For example, you can make custom CTAs for the products you recommend and then just copy and paste the shortcode into your articles whenever you publish a new commercial article.

GeneratePress Pricing

Another great thing about GeneratePress is its pricing.

The theme itself is free, but to unlock the premium modules, you’ll have to buy a license for the companion plugin called “GP Premium”. Once the plugin is installed and activated, you can enjoy all premium modules and you can get access to the Site Library, which contains beautiful pre-built sites to speed up your projects.

• GeneratePress Premium ($59/year)
• GenerateBlocks Pro ($99/year)
• GeneratePress One ($149/year)

They also offer a 30-day money-back guarantee, if you don't like the premium version. No questions asked.

Coupon / Discount

Whenever a GeneratePress discount or coupon code is made available, you will find it below. Offers come and go so check back often to see what's on offer.

Click here for the lowest price on GeneratePress

Pros and Cons of GeneratePress

Every WordPress theme we have ever worked with had things we liked and things we didn’t. GeneratePress is no different.

Fortunately, the pros far outweigh the cons with this theme!

Pros of GeneratePress

• It’s fast. While we can only measure anecdotally, we were impressed
• Extensive Site Library with a good mix of templates
• Cheapest premium option can be used on 500 sites
• Free version and reasonably priced premium plans
• Easy to use and to customize once you get the hang of it
• Customer support and lively forum

Cons of GeneratePress

• Not as intuitive to use as a drag and drop theme
• Not all templates are up to current tastes

As you can see, there’s a lot to recommend GeneratePress. There are a couple of negatives which can be mitigated quite easily, so this is good news if you like the look of the theme.

Testimonials / User Satisfaction

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

Just by browsing their support forum and WordPress help forum you can see how they helped with problems and how happy those users were. You can see that their users are extremely satisfied.

Furthermore, you can count on the fingers of your hands the number of non-5-star reviews in the repository.

Looking up the phrase “GeneratePress review” on search engines would return articles, blogs, and reviews that contain nothing but praise for the theme.

For example, see what Adam from WP Crafter gave it as a rating:

From casual users to developers, everyone recommends it and most of them even call it “the number one theme for WordPress”.

Another glowing review, this time from Brian Jackson, who is the CMO at Kinsta and also runs the blog Woorkup:

Clearly, 99% of users are satisfied with GeneratePress.

Alternatives

GeneratePress is already an excellent theme, but of course, we always like to feature alternatives, for anybody who is still considering all options. There are a few themes that can match its performance, features and support level. Here are some of them.

Astra

Astra, like GeneratePress and OceanWP, has two flavors: free and premium.

Astra focuses on utilizing page builders to help you build your site. It’s highly compatible with Beaver Builder, Elementor, Brizy (this is a new page builder, in case you haven’t heard about it) and Gutenberg (the current default WP editor).

It relies heavily on page builders for design and customization, so it only makes sense that it offers 240+ free website templates that you can use. This probably has the most number of free templates of any theme.

Like GeneratePress, its premium version will let you activate a bunch of premium modules.

Another advantage of Astra over GeneratePress is that it comes with free plugins that can extend its features. This, coupled with over three dozen free site templates, overthrows GeneratePress in the free version department. if you want to see our full Astra review, you can go here.

Divi

While Divi has had a reputation of being clunky in the past, it has made leaps and bounds in terms of performance. With everything else that is going around this theme, it's huge community, it's excellent pricing for unlimited sites, we have to suggest this as an alternative. While we love GeneratePress, we also have to say that we quite like Divi.

OceanWP

If you are not looking to spend any money on a theme, OceanWP is your best choice. It's a multipurpose, page builder friendly theme. CollectiveRay has reviewed this theme here.

It’s highly compatible with Elementor. It's even a recommended plugin when you first install OceanWP on a fresh site.

It comes with tons of customization options and its integration with Elementor makes it one of the best free themes that can build pretty looking websites without spending a dime.

Of course, it also comes with a premium version that further extends its functionalities and gives you access to tons of pro templates that you can use to speed up your project.

GeneratePress Frequently Asked Questions

Is GeneratePress a free theme?

Yes, GeneratePress has a version of the theme that is completely free. Some modules such as the Site Library, Colors, Typography, WooCommerce, Menu Plus, Import/Export and others require to opt for the premium version which starts at $59.

How do I use GeneratePress premium?

To use GeneratePress premium, first click here to get a license. Once you do you will be able to download the installation of GP Premium. You can now upload this file as you would any WordPress plugin. This then gives you access to all the GP Premium modules. You can now activate the modules you need. To keep the theme fast and lean, only enable those modules you need.

What is the fastest WordPress theme?

GeneratePress is certainly one of the hot contenders for being the fastest WordPress theme. It is incredibly lean with the default install only being 30kb in size, which is a very small footprint. The theme has very clean code and no bloat giving it excellent load times. 

Is GeneratePress a good theme?

GeneratePress is a solid and reliable theme that is trusted by many users and experts in the WordPress community. It is lightweight, fast-loading, and easy to use. It also has a clean and minimalistic design, making it suitable for a wide range of websites. The theme also has a good support community and is regularly updated, ensuring compatibility with the latest version of WordPress and security standards.

Is GeneratePress the fastest theme?

GeneratePress is considered a fast-loading theme. The theme is built with performance in mind and has a minimalistic design which helps in reducing the page size and loading time. Additionally, GeneratePress is designed to work with caching and optimization plugins, which can help to further improve the speed of your website.

Conclusion

The performance, feature set, support and pricing of GeneratePress is really good. Everything about it is nothing but positive.

Paying for the premium version will get you far. With modest pricing of $59, a 40% renewal discount and unlimited website usage, that price tag is a steal.

The only downside of GeneratePress is its free version. Compared to other popular high-rated free themes, GeneratePress’s free version pales in comparison to the premium. You need to purchase the premium version to truly enjoy its benefits. So if you don’t want to spend any money, GeneratePress is probably not for you.

Having said that, we strongly believe that GeneratePress is well worth the money.

The code quality and the level of support along with unlimited website usage make it worth every single penny. So if you've already got your eyes on it, there’s no better time than right now to get the premium version and start using it for your projects.

Start Using GeneratePress Today

About the Author

Author: David AttardWebsite: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dattard/Email: david@collectiveray.com

David has been working in or around the online and digital industry for the last 21 years. He has vast experience in the software and web design industries using WordPress, Joomla and niches surrounding them. He has worked with software development agencies, international software companies, local marketing agencies and now is Head of Marketing Operations at Aphex Media - an SEO agency. As a digital consultant, his focus is on helping businesses get a competitive advantage using a combination of their website and digital platforms available today. His blend of technology expertise combined with a strong business acumen brings a competitive edge to his writings.