The main reason you should use GeneratePress for your WordPress theme is because its blazing fast. Thanks to it’s lightweight size—just 30 kilobytes—your WordPress website will not only be fast, but responsive and stable.
In addition, SEO optimization is built into GeneratePress for the core. This means your website or blog will have a better chance of ranking on the first page of Google.
If you care about speed and SEO, this premium WordPress theme may be perfect for you. In this tutorial, we’ll be learning how to install the GeneratePress WordPress theme on your website.
1) Download GeneratePress Theme and Plugin
Although GeneratePress has a free WordPress theme available, the pro version gives you a whole bunch more layout options when it comes to customization of your website.
The premium version of the GeneratePress WordPress theme costs $49.95, and it’s worth every penny. Not only is GeneratePress one of the fastest WordPress themes, but it has SEO optimization built in. In addition to that, it’s highly customizable. We’ll be customizing GeneratePress in the next part of this WordPress tutorial series.
Also if you plan on creating multiple websites, you can use a single GeneratePress license for unlimited websites. There’s no need to purchase multiple license for multiple websites. Even if you aren’t planning on hosting multiple websites, paying less than $50 is a heck of a deal for a premium WordPress theme.
To download, from the GeneratePress website, click on Premium at the top, and scroll down to click on Add to Cart. After entering your billing information and completing checkout, you’ll receive a few emails in regards to your account creation and payment receipts.
After setting up your GeneratePress account, click on Downloads under the Accounts dropdown in the upper right corner.
You’ll want to download both the GeneratePress theme and GP Premium plugin for WordPress.
Both downloads will be zip files. We’ll install both of these individually next.
2) How to Install GeneratePress Premium WordPress Plugin
From your WordPress dashboard, click on Plugins then Add New. At the top of the plugins page click on Upload Plugin.
When you click on Choose File, you’ll want to select the file named similar to gp-premium-1.8.3.zip from your downloads folder.
After that, simply click on the Install Now button to install the GeneratePress premium plugin on your website. In a few seconds, you’ll see the the plugin was successfully installed. Now you can activate the plugin by clicking on the blue Activate Plugin button.
On the resulting page, you’ll see that the GP Premium plugin has been added to your plugins list. We need to set a few configuration options, so click on the Configure link associated with the GP Premium plugin.
GeneratePress comes with a plethora of premium modules that you’ll see listed on this page. These modules are designed to help you easily customize the theme to you liking. By default, go ahead and click on the check box at the very top to select all the GeneratePress modules. Select Activate under the Bulk Actions dropdown and click on Apply to enable these premium modules.
The final step to configuring this plugin is to add your license key. Back on your GeneratePress account page, copy your license key and paste it into the Update box on the right side of the WordPress plugin configuration page.
After you click on Save, you’ll see that you are now receiving updates to the plugin.
At this point, there will be no visible changes to your WordPress site. That’s because we only installed the plugin. We’ll be installing the theme next.
3) How to Install GeneratePress WordPress Theme
From your WordPress dashboard, click on Appearance then Themes. Click on the Add New button at the top of the page. On the next page, click on Upload Theme.
When you click on Choose File, you’ll want to select the file named similar to generatepress.2.3.zip from your downloads folder.
After that, simply click on the Install Now button to install the GeneratePress theme on your website. In a few seconds, you’ll see the the theme was successfully installed. Now you can activate the plugin by clicking on the Activate link.
UP NEXT: Customize WordPress Theme
Now that you have installed a fast, premium theme on your WordPress website, let’s look at customizing the theme to your liking.
In the next part of this WordPress tutorial series, we’ll be looking at customizing the GeneratePress theme. This involves configuring the layout of your homepage and blog posts.
As always, if you have any questions about installing a custom WordPress theme on your website, let me know in the comments below. I’ll be more than happy to help you out.
