OceanWP vs GeneratePress
The General Consensus from Real Users
The best WordPress themes help showcase your website’s best or what you want the world to see. However, each one of these themes is quite different from one another, the most popular ones being the OceanWP and GeneratePress. An OceanWP vs GeneratePress head to head comparison shows the relative strengths and weaknesses of these two WP page builders. These two themes provide users with a reliable platform where you can build your dream website with ease. OceanWP is better known for its vast design options and flexibility. Simultaneously, the GP is more lightweight and performance-optimized and is one of the most popular themes out there.
Though they’re known for those benefits, how does WordPress build these themes upon the plugins, code, and extensions that make WordPress’s underlying themes to a different level? Each of them is great and beneficial for various reasons. With that in mind, let us present to you our OceanWP vs. GeneratePress takes on those different reasons why these two are great WordPress themes.
OceanWP vs GeneratePress
You’ve more likely to come across these two popular themes if you’re planning on constructing a website via WordPress. Regarding GeneratePress vs. OceanWP, they have many core similarities, so it can be hard to decide which theme builder is the best for your website.
GeneratePress and OceanWP are the most common and popular page builders for web developers for different reasons. An overview of OceanWP vs. GeneratePress is that the latter wins when it comes to quality code and experience, while the OceanWP provides more feature-rich themes, options, and complexity. You can also try the free version of these themes to get an insight into what each WP theme has to offer, though both offer excellent and fast support.
But overall, these two are top-quality themes, so you’re more likely not going to make a wrong decision when it comes to choosing the best helper in achieving the website of your dreams. However, some differences might make one theme better than the others for your specific needs.
In this post, we’ve highlighted their features, advantages, disadvantages, and the overall differences in these themes to help you choose which one is better for you. Read on to find out more.
Pros & Cons of OceanWP
Having an established website for your store, business, or company can represent your brand, and appearance and functionality does matter. The OceanWP theme is a popular WordPress responsive page builder that offers over 400,000 active installations. It lets you optimize your website to look great on a desktop computer and smaller screens as well. It allows your website to adapt to any screen size.
That’s just one of the many benefits that this website builder has to offer its users. Below we have highlighted the pros and cons of the OceanWP website builder.
What We Liked
- Free Version
The OceanWP’s demo includes its core theme and numerous benefits, such as pre-built demo websites, pre-designed templates, and more. It allows you to fully experience what it has to offer before purchasing the beaver builder’s premium model.
- Swift Customer Support
The support that the OceanWP comes with is excellent, and their team helped us promptly resolve their product issues. Also, when you purchase the OceanWP, customer service is available for you for life, and you don’t have to pay for extensions on their support service.
- Enhances Stock WordPress Widgets
The OceanWP visual composer automatically enhances the appearance and functionality of several stock WordPress widgets like recent posts and newsletters. It helps in alleviating other time-consuming tasks that come in customizing your widgets for your website.
- Free Templates
The OceanWP provides more free pre-designed templates than most website builders of themes in WordPress. It allows you to experience the website design process by providing you with templates that you can use in their demos with no charge.
- Top Quality Coding
The OceanWP is lightweight and loads quickly regarding the standard layout and functions, providing you with a seamless user experience. It also improves your website’s memory consumption by up to 30% to 50%, giving you more smooth operations.
- Price
You can fully experience what the brand has to offer because OceanWP’s core theme is free, and other premium versions are reasonably priced. The prices for this tool comes in three variations, so you can easily choose what best fits your needs. You can avail of their service for one website, three websites, or pay upfront for unlimited usage.
- SEO Friendly
It uses a schema markup and other SEO (Search Engine Optimization) friendly features like appropriate headline HTML tags, intuitive site navigation structure, and more.
- Money & Time Saver
One useful advantage of the OceanWP is perfect for remote workers, especially since they may use the OceanWP’s demo import and export feature to set up their websites in four clicks quickly.
- Integrations & Extensions
Extensions such as WooCommerce integrate significantly to the theme, and several other functions, such as the newest Gutenberg Editor are available in its core-bundle extensions.
What We Did Not Like
- Building Pages
The selection method and checkbox of its page building feature don’t work well most times. It often loads slowly despite the OceanWP’s top-quality coding, though it didn’t happen most times, it’s still something you should be wary about since it can slow down your website creation process.
- Incompatible With SOP (Speed Optimization Plugins)
The OceanWP gives you a static header where javascript or search option does not work. These situations happen only with extended theme scripts, so you can’t use additional plugins such as Autoptimize and get rid of query things with the OceanWP.
- Confusing Customizer
The customizer setting of the OceanWP can get overwhelming because of the vast options it offers. It’s hard to find particular settings that you need right away, which can significantly affect your workflow when creating or customizing your website. It can also be overwhelming for beginners.
Pros & Cons of GeneratePress
GeneratePress is one of the most popular WordPress element or website builders out there, having one of the highest ratings in the WordPress repository of 848 out of 858 responses for GeneratePress theme reviews. Currently it has more than 200,000 active installs. It’s a lightweight theme that you can extend with various premium packs of extensions that are compatible with all website builders.
Those are just some of the significant benefits of the GP tool; below are the pros and cons of the page builder.
What We Liked
- Great Page Builder Compatibility
One great pro of the GP is that it offers excellent builder compatibility with many extensions. It can support both default and custom models created by plugins or third-party themes.
- Ease of Use
The GP is easy to use when compared to the OceanWP because it is a lightweight theme that provides you with easier setting up and running of the program. Besides having an easier setting up process, it’s also easier to use than other brands because GP offers an intuitive and straightforward menu option.
- WooCommerce Integration
The integration of WooCommerce is fantastic, thanks to the numerous WooCommerce tweaks built directly in the website builder. For instance, the GP has an integrated shopping cart popup.
- Smooth Performance
Because of GP’s top-quality coding, excellent page builder compatibility with other browsers, and simple page builder plugin, you can ensure that you would only get the best performance of any theme or page builder can offer you. It performs with no problem even if all modules on the website are currently active.
- Top-Quality Site Templates
The templates offered by GP are intuitive and straightforward, which provides more comfortable use for both beginners and experts. They also provide well-coded templates with no hidden charges.
- Extensive Customization Options
GP comes with a wide array of customization options that help you with anything and everything the web developer needs.
- Extensive documentation
The documentation of the theme is more exhaustive, which lets you have access to a better knowledge base without having to ask for support for tweaking the smallest things.
- Mobile-Friendly
Both the demo version and the paid version of the GP is fully mobile responsive. You don’t have to worry about manually optimizing your website’s layouts for other screen sizes, especially for mobile phones, because GP automatically does it for you. It alleviates more time, and you can focus on the bugger things regarding the creation of your website or page.
- Light Weight
You don’t have to worry about slow loading times and overall bad user experience because the GP is only under 1 MB (Megabyte), which means faster speed and page loading experience. It allows you to work on your WP websites, pages, posts, and more with ease.
- 14 Pro Modules
You can find these 14 professional modules in the free version of the GP that allows you to customize your website in any way you want. It allows you to have a basis on your websites or pages without having to pay extra for professional web designers.
What We Did Not Like
- Free Version is Very Limited
Unlike the OceanWP, the free version of the GP only offers minimal features, which doesn’t let you fully experience what it has to offer before purchasing it. However, it still offers a reasonable experience that lets you understand how GP operates.
Overview of OceanWP Features
Regarding the GeneratePress vs. OceanWP comparison, though they offer similar functions, both have significantly different features that make the other favored more than the other. What makes the OceanWP different from the Astra vs. Generate Press is its free demo, which comes with a core theme, numerous free extensions with no additional charges, and demos, which you can install to add more features to your website. Below is an overview of the many features that OceanWP has to offer.
Creative Demos
You can import any demo with OceanWP’s import extension for their demos or their pro import extensions for paid versions. Providing you with an ease of use experience because all of these can be done in one single click.
Free Extension
One of the best features of OceanWP is that it also offers numerous extensions, such as:
- Modal Window – This plugin inserts premium content into a model with an easy to access opening button, allowing you to create as many modal you want with custom content, colors, and width.
- Post Slider – This extension displays posts into a slider with multiple options, such as the number of blogs you want to show.
- Stick Plugin – This extension allows you to stick elements on your website that would enable you with easy customization with the addition of offsets for spacing around its sticky feature.
Translation & RTL Ready
OceanWP supports RTL (register transfer level), which allows you to translate the website’s language content into your native language. It provides you with a smoother and more comfortable experience if you prefer to work under the guidance of your native tongue.
eCommerce Ready
If you want to open your online store but don’t know-how, even if you don’t have experience in coding or website design, GP makes it possible for you. Creating your online store has never been this easy. The OceanWP provides a unique feature in building e-commerce websites with its handy WooCommerce feature.
WooCommerce Integration
This feature can be easily incorporated on your websites because these WooCommerce features tweaks are built directly into the website. OceanWP has recently released many features in their WooCommerce options such as:
- Cart Icon Shortcode – You can now display your website’s cart icon with this easy shortcode feature, which allows you to create any header and place the cart icon anywhere on the site.
- Mini Cart Available in Mobile Application – This new feature will enable you to display your shopping cart icon on mobile. This setting is the default, but you can also disable it if you want.
In addition to the features mentioned above, it can also provide you with a quick-view mode that lets your clients see a product without having to leave your website’s page.
Fast Page Load Time
The OceanWP gets the highest grade with the top speed testing tools tailored for these website builders. That’s because the developers of GP only use the best top-quality coding techniques in creating their product.
Versatile & Fully Responsive
Any website that you create through the OceanWP will look great and functional seamlessly on all types of tech gadgets, from mobile phones, desktop computers, smartphones, to tablet screens.
Dedicated Support Team
OceanWP offers the best customer service and technical support around, ensuring you get the help you need promptly.
Built-in SEO Base
With the importance of garnering organic traffic for the best websites, OceanWP has built its theme with some of the best and easy SEO practices that any beginner or professional can use.
Overview of GeneratePress Features
GP is a WordPress website builder or theme that aims to provide fast and efficient assistance when it comes to rendering your webpage through WP. GP comes in a free version and a paid version that comes with exclusive plugins extending the theme. It’s a lightweight builder that can tackle any website project you throw at it. Below is an overview of the features of the renowned GP.
Secure & Stable Coding
The developers of GP ensure that their coding only offers the best security and stability to your website or pages. Leaders in the vast WordPress community have reviewed their code. Also, they only use the latest and most stable coding standards up to date.
Light Weight & Clean Coding for Faster Website Speed
The smoothness and speed are some of the essential aspects of any website or page. GP developers ensure efficient speed to your sites because of their tiny footprint and clean code, which enables you to start as fast as possible.
Small Footprint
For starter websites, you should start with the smallest footprint possible to ensure that further adjustments that need to be made in the future won’t slow the operation. The default WordPress installation of the GP theme is less than 30 KB (Kilobyte).
Page Header Add-on
The page header feature is the newest function offered by GP that enables you to do the following:
- It allows you to create re-usable page headers and apply them to your posts, blog, 404 page, categories, and search results.
- It accepts template tags that enable you to build a template from scratch and apply it to your website’s pages, posts, or other single custom post-type templates.
- It allows you to construct a page header that can automatically grab the date, author, post titles, categories, and custom fields and apply these to your page header for all your existing posts.
Easy to Access
Besides that ease of use feature, your website should also be accessible for users to browse through your content easily. The GP follows the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 2.0 standards to ensure a seamless user experience.
WooCommerce
Like most great theme builders for WordPress, GP offers a WooCommerce integration feature that easily lets you customize the color, typography, and layout options of your online store.
Built-in SEO Practices
The GP offers built-in schema structured data, validated HTML, and quick load times, which gives you a head start with your search engines to maximize organic traffic of your websites before you even add content to it.
14 Premium Modules (for the paid version)
The premium model of the GP offers you 14 professional modules that allow easier customization of your website and pages. Below are some of the modules that come with the exclusive GP content.
- Site Library – GP gives you importable demo sites to provide you with the much-needed boost for your next website project.
- Vast Color Options – They let you control your site colors by offering you more than 60 different color options.
- Typography Options – GP allows you to tailor your site to your preferences by providing over 70 typography options that give you complete control of your website’s text.
No Dependencies
GP eliminates unnecessary scripts by not loading it if it’s not needed for your website’s operation. These include the jQuery that GP replaced with clean and smooth vanilla javascript that ensures fast and efficient service of your page. You don’t have to worry about rendering block issues anymore.
Easy Layout Control
You can now take control of your website’s layout on both desktop and mobile easier with GP’s layout controls that make the process more straightforward. These layout control features include margins, sidebar layouts, padding, and more.
Ease of Use: How Quick Can You Create a Website With OceanWP and GeneratePress?
Both themes are fast and lightweight and work great in terms of Search Engine Optimization features and page speed. They’re also very intuitive and easy to use. But here are some of their distinct differences that allow you to differentiate which theme is easier to use and lets you create a website faster.
The Ocean WP and GP can be customized directly from the customer, which you can find by going to the settings and clicking on the appearance then customizing it. It gives you more convenience because it will enable you to access all parameters in one place without having to browse through the entire dashboard. This little practice allows you to see which of them are more navigable.
GeneratePress vs. OceanWP
OceanWP – It offers you a theme panel on your admin dashboard, which concentrates some sections of the customizer and provides links to quickly customer-specific aspects of your websites such as typography, logo, sidebars, colors, etc.
GP – The GP offers fewer options, only providing you with less extensive and more straightforward menus. Still, they usually go straight to the point, which prevents you from getting lost in customizing your website or page.
The Verdict: Although OceanWP provides you with the most options and handy features, it can easily confuse you with the vast possibilities and allow you to get lost. However, the GP offers a more uncomplicated, intuitive menu that makes the process of creating a website or page faster and easier
How is the Support of OceanWP and GeneratePress?
No matter how fast or easy the theme is to use, you’re going to have some questions that need answers, that’s why these themes need to have reliable support options that you can rely on.
- GP
- Offer support forums.
- It provides a year’s worth of support and updates.
- Each offers ticket submissions, which is the primary way of getting help on these website builders.
- It offers documentation.
- OceanWP
- It offers a priority support plan (for an additional fee).
- It comes with a year’s worth of updates and supports.
- All offers come with ticket submissions.
- It provides documentation.
Though both the GP and OceanWP offer documentation, the knowledge base is on par. However, both the OceanWP and GP documentation are both vague, but it covers most of the essential bases. The support of the two are equal and provide decent information via their knowledge base through tutorials, articles, and more.
Pricing of OceanWP and GeneratePress
Both themes offer a free version at WordPress’s website then you can opt for their premium versions to tack on extra functionality. Between the two GP is the more affordable theme if you plan on using it on multiple websites, and the OceanWP theme is more affordable if you plan on using it on one site, although the difference between these themes isn’t drastic.
- OceanWP
- $39 of use for one website or page.
- $129 for unlimited website creation.
- GP
- $49.95 for unlimited website creation.
Both OceanWP and GP give you access to their premium site library with a regular theme license. But when it comes to renewal discounts regarding the two different builders, GP offers the most generous discounts up to 40 percent.
Which One Should You Choose? OceanWP vs GeneratePress?
Based on the different advantages, disadvantages, and features of the two popular WP builders, our bet in this OceanWP vs. GeneratePress showdown is GeneratePress. Because this WordPress theme outweighs the features that the OceanWP offers, and it has more supported plugins. Its free version provides more advanced features, but the premium version takes web designing to unprecedented levels. That’s why it’s ranked at the top and have high ratings on Best Free Personal Blog WordPress Themes 2020 and Free Premium WordPress Themes 2020.