Hello everyone, hope you all are doing good. WordPress has lot to offer when we speak about blogging. There are dedicated blogging themes, easy to use page editors, comment section enabled by default etc. and many more.
One of such WordPress blogging theme is GeneratePress. Although not specifically build for blogging, GeneratePress has some distinct features which makes it among the best choice for blogging. It is also the theme used on this website and so, we feel comfortable now to share our thoughts on it.
In today’s article, we will learn more about GeneratePress: Best blogging theme for WordPress, and also help you decide if it is an ideal theme for you or not.
Fundamental features needed in WordPress theme for blogging
For any blogging website, there are few features which are a must have in order to have a good blogging experience. In WordPress, many of these features are dependent on the WordPress theme. It is therefore essential to choose a theme which covers maximum of these points.
We have developed a list with explanation for all these points which is given below:
1. Easy to add and style new content
The core of the blogging is purely content based. With blogging, more then 90% of user experience is based on quality and presentation of content. Although quality of content is based on individual users, presentation of content is something which heavily depends on theme. The theme you select should have easy to use layout for adding as well as styling of content. If the theme helps you to simplify this task for you, it will further help you to concentrate more on the content.
2. Lightweight theme with fast loading speed
Since blogging is purely based on content, having a WordPress theme which is lightweight and has fast loading speed by default can help you reduce unwanted load on server. This will make sure to keep your website fresh without bloatware for longer period of time.
3. Easy to add sidebar and add custom information into it
In any blogging website, having extra information like recent post, featured post etc. In sidebar helps you to increase user activity on your website. It also helps you to get the user focus on featured post.
It should also allow you to add images in the sidebar. Making images for post can be time consuming specially if you are not using the right tools, you can thus check out this great post on Free Online Screenshot Tools, it will further help you save time.
4. Easy to add and design archive pages
Blog archive pages are the first choices for many bloggers as their home page. It helps them to expose the user to multiple post at a time and hence increasing the probability of user staying for longer period of time. WordPress post archive feature by default is very basic with no customization option. It is thus important that the theme you select has special widgets, page layouts which can help you add and design different types of archive pages.
5. Easy to change typography and color
Due to the focus of blogging solely on content, the typography and color of text also becomes very important. By default, changes for typography and color needs basic CSS knowledge but even after that, consistency is not guaranteed. In such cases, there are many themes in WordPress which has settings to change default global text styling. For any blogging website, this feature is a must to avoid waste of time.
GeneratePress blogging specific features
GeneratePress at its core is a lightweight and feature rich theme. It has great integration with membership plugins as well as ecommerce plugins like Woocommerce. Although it is not specifically build for blogging, It has many blogging specific features which makes it ideal for use even on a WordPress blogging website.
We have curated a list of these features which is given below:
1. Lightweight, fast and feature rich
GeneratePress is considered to be among the most lightweight theme available for WordPress. It has the prefect 100% score for pagespeed in both GT Metrix and pagespeed insight on default installation. Along with being fast, it also has dedicated feature modules which adds features like sticky menu, masonry archive layout, archive column and specialized page builder.
GeneratePress also maintains the pagespeed even after activation of all modules making it ideal lightweight theme for blogging.
2. One click sidebar addition
GeneratePress by default has option for right hand sidebar. On each page and post, you can select whether the layout should include sidebar or not. Enabling sidebar is just a task of one click and it can also be disabled for specific pages and post.
Also adding content on sidebar has a simple drag and drop layout with option to add many different type of predefined widgets. Some of the widgets available are ‘Recent Post’, ‘Navigation Menu’, ‘Post archive’. We can also add images, list, plain text on the sidebar.
General option to change sidebar layout in GeneratePress is shown below
3. Advance global settings
GeneratePress provides many different type of global settings which we can change. From layout settings for header, navigation, sidebar, blog content type to typography change like font size, font family, font weight, text transform. It provides a wide range of flexibility for our website content.
Although many settings are small and subtle, they help us to keep everything uniform throughout the website and also help us tweak the overall settings the way we want. It makes the theme setup and modification experience streamlined thus helping us to focus more on the content.
4. Advance archive layout option
One of the prime issues with post archive in WordPress is lack of layout flexibility. For any layout changes, only option in default WordPress theme is to change post archive template using php. This method is time consuming and needs technical expertise.
In GeneratePress, there are many archive widgets as well as special blog archive features like ‘Archive Columns’ i.e. display of archive column wise and ‘Masonry’ layout which helps us to display archive in masonry layout. GeneratePress also has it’s own page builder which has many widgets helpful to make a custom archive page.
This archive features helps us to develop archive pages in GeneratePress with minimum efforts.
5. Advance site navigation features
On any website, top navigation is the first thing user will see. It is therefore important that our website main navigation is simple to use, well integrated with the design and has all the important links.
In GeneratePress, for styling of site navigation there are options to change the color, hover color, typography. Along with this, GeneratePress also provides features like sticky menu, specialized mobile navigation, secondary navigation.
Due to all these features, GeneratePress provides ton of flexibility on tweaking UI/UX of site navigation.
Conclusion
GeneratePress as a theme has lot to offer along with keeping everything lightweight. It is an ideal theme for blogging due to it’s blogging specific features. We hope we were able to help you make the decision on whether GeneratePress is ideal for you or not. If you want to learn more about GeneratePress, you can visit the following link.
For any suggestions and queries, you can reach OnlinewithWP.
