GeneratePress from an Agency perspective

I wanted to add my review because I rarely see reviews here from the perspective of agency owners. We have a different set of criteria for selecting tools like themes and some of these criteria include stability through upgrades and the quality of support. I apologize in advance for the length of this review ??

Also, when we go through the process of selecting a new theme, we do so with the intent of using it as a framework to build all our client sites which range from simple blogs or brochure sites to eCommerce sites and sites using many Custom Post Types and we also use Beaver Builder and Beaver Themer on many of our projects. Furthermore, almost all of them are bilingual or multilingual sites built with WordPress Multisite (my preferred way to build multilingual sites to avoid the overhead and compatibility issues of the usual plugins). So we have an established workflow and toolset we refined through the years and any theme we use as a base or framework needs to integrate well into it.

We started integrating GeneratePress in our workflow a few months ago after using the popular Genesis theme framework since 2013. This was not brought up by any major problems or issues with Genesis itself which powers a large number of our active client sites (active meaning we have ongoing maintenance plans for them). Genesis’ hook system is very powerful and very flexible but, this also means a lot of common site tweaks need to be accomplished with code. Also, Genesis child themes tend to be heavy as they load little resources from the parent theme and need to provide most of the site’s functionality which makes updating them harder (and they will need to be updated sometimes to support new WP functionality like Gutenberg).

I looked at GeneratePress because I wanted to streamline our visual integration workflow and make things faster but without loosing the power or flexibility we had with Genesis. A majority of our projects are 100% custom designs so starting from a solid blank canvas like GeneratePress makes a lot of sense. We of course use GeneratePress Premium so we can leverage all its visual options to make much faster work of the basic visual integration of a client’s design. Our GeneratePress child themes are also lighter and only contain the customization needed for the site.

GeneratePress is lean and efficient yet brings in more out of the box functionality than most frameworks or starter themes do which is what enables us to create lighter child themes that will rarely if ever need to be updated. It also offers just as much flexibility through hooks and filters as Genesis did but leverages them through visual tools in GeneratePress Premium’s Elements feature which is a no brainer to get if you decide to use GeneratePress. This also means less reliance on the page builder and lighter sites.

But on top of that, I cannot say enough good things about the quick, professional and personalized support Tom and his team provide. For agency users like me, this is absolutely key. So I heartily recommend GeneratePress whether you want to build the one site for yourself or need to integrate a powerful theme in a more agency-like workflow. No matter the challenge, this theme shines and enables us to build more effective web sites for our clients.