GeneratePress: Love it or Leave it

What’s your favorite WordPress theme? Do you use different themes with different projects? What criteria do you use to choose a WordPress theme?

I have stuck with GeneratePress for a while and I have no plans of changing any time soon.

WordPress users love GeneratePress because of the philosophy of the team behind it.

These are my reasons for using GeneratePress on all of my sites

GeneratePress: Alternatives

GeneratePress is a theme with more than 500,000+ and beat only by a few other WordPress themes such as:

Theme	Active Installations
Astra	1+ million
Hello	1+ million
OceanWP	700,000+

Will GeneratePress be able to keep up as other WordPress themes are born?:

Kadence	200,000+
Blocksy	100,000+

These are some themes that have been out there for a while and haven’t beaten GeneratePress yet

Neve	300,000+
Hestia	100,000+

After updating the numbers, I see that most themes are not growing as fast as Kadence when it comes to active installations.

What Makes a Theme the Best WordPress Theme?

There is no best WordPress theme since all publishers or creators have different needs.

I think that GeneratePress because that’s the theme I am using and I don’t feel like moving other themes like Blocksy or Kadence despite the fact that they offer way more features for free than GeneratePress

Basically these are aspects that I would have to consider if I change my existing to another WordPress Theme.

Lightweight Theme

I like to keep things as lightweight because I monetize my sites with display ads so I have to compensate for the requests that the ads will ads.

I don’t use all the options available in GeneratePress to keep things as lightweight as possible so ads have time to load

My sites load only one or two stylesheets and around three scripts so I don’t feel like moving to a theme that loads by default several stylesheets and scripts.

Learning Curve

I have been playing and messing with GeneratePress and I think that I know pretty well what every option does.

If I wanted to move from my existing theme to a theme like Kadence or Blocksy, I would have to start learning what every tiny option does.

I also would have to spend some time trying to optimize it and that takes a lot of testing.

And I don’t want to do that If I don’t need to.

Support

The best support is the support that I don’t need. I don’t ask for support unless I really need it.

What I like about GeneratePress is that you can learn and find answers to your questions by reading support questions made by other users.

Sometimes you need a snippet code and you find a detailed answer like it was you who asked for it.

Redesign Pages

I don’t mess with the post’s design at all so changing themes won’t mess with everything I have written and my main source of ad revenue.

One thing I would have to spend time fixing and rebuilding is the pages.

I don’t build complex shit but rebuilding simple stuff takes hours especially if you need to do the same process for several sites.

My Gutenberg Blocks Plugin

GeneratePress has GenerateBlocks, a Gutenberg Blocks plugin built for WordPress users who love GeneratePress

Other Themes use different plugins to design their pages. Kadence uses Kadence Blocks

Astra uses Spectra, Blocksy uses Stackable and it is currently in its own blocks plugin.

If I changed my WordPress theme, I would have to learn what that plugin does and learn how to optimize it for speed.

I know that I can keep GenerateBlocks but that would prevent me from using templates from their sites libraries.

GeneratePress Premium:

I use GeneratePress for two main reasons:

• Elements to create footers and page headers
• Elements to customize my 404 page
• Elements to merge headers
• Elements to add Author Boxes
• Add CSS to certain conditionally

I use Code Snippets plugins to customize here and there so I don’t need the rest of the options in Premium

If I could find a replacement for the elements section from GeneratePress Premium, I would remove it.