Mobile first, lightweight Theme for Wordpress

• Wordpress website - start to finish.
• Plugins For Every Wordpress Website
• Mobile first, lightweight Theme for Wordpress - (YOU ARE HERE)
• Additional Wordpress Plugins used on Permian Trader
• Specific Tweaks for Permian Trader

GeneratePress is an outstanding, mobile first, lightweight theme for Wordpress. It is the theme I use the most, and the theme I used for Permian Trader.

Many themes that are touted as Mobile compatible are indeed responsive, and will work on mobile, but are designed to fit first a desktop version. This means that the website will be sized first at the largest size and then re-flow, move, adjust as the sizes get progressively smaller.

GeneratePress is the reverse, as it is designed to display as lightweight as possible, at the smallest size first. This means a website loading on a phone using GeneratePress will load more quickly.

Until you get to more complicated features, images will load more quickly, due to GeneratePress downloading ONLY the smaller sized images. For instance, if you upload a large image that is 1200 pixels wide, it will be made into several smaller sizes via the usual Wordpress handling of images. When you request the webpage on a mobile device with a theme such as GeneratePress, a smaller image will load, NOT the larger image.

Many websites, and many Wordpress themes, will still download the larger image, but display it smaller. This takes time, and bandwidth.

GeneratePress does great from an SEO perspective. I still recommend using an SEO plugin such as the All In One SEO Pack.

Another important aspect is loading dependencies. GeneratePress does use JavaScript, but does not require an external library be used. Just vanilla JavaScript.

Configuration in the free version is minimal. There are a few features and options, and of course, with CSS you can do a LOT.

I want to stress, that for many sites, the free version is ABSOLUTELY ENOUGH. My primary impetus for getting the premium GeneratePress plugin was for the ability to use sections. There are indeed other solutions out there that offer this, but I wanted a solution that would be sure to work as expected.

GeneratePress Premium

The GeneratePress Premium feature set is diverse and plentiful. One of the really nice things is the level of customization with regards to colors and layout, not withstanding all of the additional features.

The additional features include sections, disabling certain portions of the theme, custom headers, disabling page headers, very specific page tweaks to overall default changes.

The important thing is that site speed is still great. I DID notice that when I turned on all of the features, that the loading of the theme customization on the back-end takes a bit. But this is only on the back-end. On the front end, all is great. Especially with the caching in place that I set up.

Additional features for the premium version are:

• Backgrounds
• Blog
• Colors
• Copyright
• Disable Elements
• Elements
• GP Hooks
• Import / Export
• Menu Plus
• Page Header
• Sections
• Sites
• Spacing
• Typography
• WooCommerce

This is quite a list, and inside each feature, are varying amounts of configuration. 

For instance, the color menu adds 60 color options.

The sections menu (the main reason for getting the Premium plugin) has options for a background image, colors, font styles, etc. 

Note: This is one section where I had to use CSS along with jquery to manually tweak the image to show the correct size depending on if the site was on mobile versus desktop.

The last additional feature I'll show from the premium plugin is the "Disable Elements" option. As you can see, each option inside this feature has multiple settings.

GeneratePress is a fantastic theme, and is a real workhorse. As I continue to use it, and learn more about how to adjust and tweak, I like it even better. As part of my license, I can use it on as many sites as I like, which is a nice benefit as well.

If you are looking for a great theme to use on your site, I absolutely recommend GeneratePress, along with the Premium plugin.

• Wordpress website - start to finish.
• Plugins For Every Wordpress Website
• Mobile first, lightweight Theme for Wordpress - (YOU ARE HERE)
• Additional Wordpress Plugins used on Permian Trader
• Specific Tweaks for Permian Trader

What can I answer for you? Send me your questions. You can email me directly at [email protected]. Also feel free to message me via LinkedIn. I might even write an article based on your question.