Tom Usborne

Tom Usborne is an Alberta-based WordPress developer best known as the creator of GeneratePress, a lightweight WordPress theme with more than 500,000 active installs, and of the GenerateBlocks plugin. He builds them through his company EDGE22 Studios.

Usborne started making websites at the age of 11 and spent years as a freelance web designer and developer for small and medium-sized businesses. He kept stripping features out of bloated commercial themes for his client sites, so he wrote his own lean base theme and submitted it for free to the WordPress.org directory in May 2014 to see whether anyone else wanted it. They did: interest in the free GeneratePress grew quickly, and he stopped taking client work to focus on it full time.

The business model is freemium. The core theme is free, and GeneratePress Premium is a paid plugin that adds modules users can switch on only when they need them, which keeps pages fast. By February 2018 the theme had passed a million downloads and Usborne told Post Status he was about to reach 30,000 premium customers, mostly through word of mouth rather than paid marketing. WordPress.org now counts more than 7.2 million downloads and over 500,000 active installs, with a 98% rating from more than 1,400 reviews.

In 2020 he launched GenerateBlocks, a small set of flexible blocks for the WordPress block editor that now has over 200,000 active installs, followed by GenerateBlocks Pro, a site library, GenerateCloud for sharing patterns across sites and GeneratePress AI. Both are built around the same idea of producing light, fast markup.

Usborne matters as a quiet example of the WordPress product path: a freelancer who scratched his own itch, gave the core away on WordPress.org and built a durable, largely word-of-mouth business on top of it.