Astra WordPress theme review: A comprehensive guide

Our Verdict

Our Verdict

Astra is a lightweight and highly customizable WordPress theme developed by Brainstorm Force. It is designed to provide users with a fast, feature-rich, and versatile foundation for building a wide range of websites, including blogs, business websites, portfolios, and online stores. Astra is compatible with popular page builders like Elementor and Beaver Builder, making it easy for users to create professional-looking websites without writing code.

Pros

• Lightweight and fast
• Highly customizable
• Compatibility with page builders
• Regular updates and support

Cons

• Limited free version
• Learning curve for beginners
• Dependency on third-party plugins

4.8

Our ratings take into account a product's cost, features, ease of use, customer service and other category-specific attributes. All ratings are determined solely by our editorial team.

Starting price

$49

Providing a foundation for website design

Yes

Enabling customization and flexibility

Astra offers extensive customization options

Perhaps you've come across the Astra WordPress theme but are unsure if it's the right choice for your next website project. With over 900,000 websites currently utilizing it and boasting an impressive five-star rating from over 4109 reviews, Astra has certainly made its mark as one of the most popular themes available.

The developers of Astra have created a standout product, focusing on speed and efficiency. Weighing in at just 50 KB compared to the average 330 KB of most themes, Astra is not only lightning-fast but also rich in features suitable for various website types. Moreover, it stands out as one of the most user-friendly and customizable free themes on the market.

This review dives into the reasons behind Astra's popularity, examining its bold claims and features. We'll guide you through the process of creating an Astra website using a starter template, discuss optimal hosting options, and explore whether upgrading to the premium version might be beneficial for you.

Key features of Astra

Engineered for swift performance

Let's start with website speed. Right off the bat, Astra stands out as one of the swiftest themes available. It's meticulously coded and remarkably lightweight, despite its extensive features.

Studies consistently demonstrate that faster page loading times lead to improved conversion rates, making page speed a crucial factor for all websites. Slow-loading pages result in a poor user experience, leading visitors to quickly lose patience and leave—a phenomenon reflected in the fact that 40% of users abandon websites that take more than 3 seconds to load.

Given this, it's unsurprising that search engines prioritize serving up fast-loading pages.

In addition to the content of your WordPress site, your choice of hosting significantly impacts its speed and performance. Among hosting options, I recommend opting for Managed WordPress hosting, specifically designed to support WordPress sites. Presently, EasyWP offers the swiftest Managed WordPress hosting available, starting from as little as a dollar. Pairing this with Astra results in the most cost-effective and fastest solution for your WordPress website.

Integration with page builders

A notable advantage of Astra themes is their compatibility with WordPress and numerous WordPress plugins, distinguishing them from other options. Particularly, Astra seamlessly integrates with most major page builder plugins, including:

• Gutenberg—While not strictly categorized as a page-builder plugin, Astra functions smoothly with WordPress' block editor.
• Divi
• Beaver Builder
• Elementor

Page builders empower users to customize their websites extensively without the need for coding. However, even without a page builder, Astra's robust customizer features allow users to make significant customizations to the default theme. Additionally, with the assistance of the Ultimate Addons for Gutenberg, users can create professional-looking web pages within the Astra framework, simulating the functionality of page builders without directly using one.

Robust starter site selection

The Astra Starter Sites plugin offers a multitude of pre-built complete websites tailored to various niches. Recognizing the challenges of starting from scratch, Astra developers emphasize the ease and efficiency of using professionally designed sites at your fingertips.

These pre-designed templates enable users to kickstart their website customization with just a few clicks, eliminating the need to figure out complex layouts from scratch. Instead, users can effortlessly replace demo content with their own images and text, resulting in a professional-looking website in no time.

Unlike some themes that provide only single-page templates, Astra offers fully functional websites with essential pages, plugins, and features, simplifying the web design process with WordPress.

Astra boasts the largest library of pre-built WordPress website templates, ensuring users can find a design to suit their needs. To utilize these starter sites, users must utilize Beaver Builder, Elementor, WordPress editor Gutenberg (for WordPress 5.0 or higher), or Divi, as each starter site design is tailored to work with a specific page builder.

In addition to stunning design templates, installing a starter site grants access to the entire Pixabay image library within the Media Library, facilitating the search for high-quality, free images.

If you're intrigued and believe Astra is a suitable choice for your website, you can download it for free and continue exploring its features as outlined in the theme review.

Performs excellently in Google search rankings

While many WordPress themes boast about being search engine-friendly, only a few actually incorporate features that align with modern SEO standards. Astra stands out in this regard, as it prioritizes both page speed—a key factor for Google—and Schema markup. Schema markup is a structured data format that enhances search engine comprehension of website content, leading to more pertinent search results for users. Astra ensures that Schema markup is applied to every page on Astra websites by default, further enhancing their search engine visibility.

Exploring the contents of Astra

Astra is hailed by developers as “the swiftest, fully customizable, and visually appealing theme suitable for blogs, personal portfolios, and business websites.” 

Its remarkable lightweight design ensures that Astra websites typically load in under half a second. Another distinguishing feature is its compatibility with all major page builder plugins like Divi, Beaver Builder, and Elementor, along with full support for WordPress' Gutenberg editor.

For those who prefer not to start from scratch, Astra offers a solution with its Starter Sites feature, allowing users to import complete website designs with just one click. With over 70 designs to choose from, catering to various needs such as portfolios, businesses, and blogs, these templates eliminate the guesswork involved in customizing WordPress themes.

Additionally, Astra offers:

• Seamless integration with WooCommerce for e-commerce readiness.
• Full access to the theme's code, as it is 100% open source.
• SEO-friendly markup for better search engine optimization.
• A plethora of free Astra-compatible plugins to enhance website functionality.
• Exclusive time-saving features with the Astra Pro upgrade.
• Translation-ready functionality for creating multilingual websites.

For real-life examples of websites utilizing Astra, refer to the showcase by WPDonuts. With these features in mind, let's dive into our review of the Astra theme!

Utilizing Astra starter sites

Next, we'll proceed to download the Astra theme, select a starter site template, and explore the customization options available for your new Astra website.

Install and enable

• First, Install and activate the Astra theme from the WordPress Themes library.
• Now, it's time to add a starter site as the foundation for your website design. To do so, you'll need to install the Starter Templates plugin.
• Once the plugin is activated, you'll notice a new 'Astra Sites' menu within the Appearance section. Navigate to Appearance -> Astra Sites.
• Here, you'll have the opportunity to select the page builder you're using to construct your site—a feature not commonly found in other themes. Choose a page builder to preview the Astra Starter Sites templates compatible with it. In this instance, I've opted for Gutenberg.

Choose your design

Choose a design to access a preview. You can also navigate between different pages to gain a comprehensive understanding of the site's capabilities out-of-the-box.

If you're not prepared to add Astra immediately, you can explore the Astra Starter Sites page on the official Astra website for a comprehensive list of available site designs. Once you've identified a design template you'd like to customize, simply click "Import Complete Site". Alternatively, you can choose to import the home template. For this demonstration, we'll import the complete site.

Now, Astra will commence building your website.

Import your new website design template

You'll receive confirmation that your starter site has imported successfully when you see a message saying "Hurray! The Website Imported Successfully!" displayed below. Simply click the blue button labeled 'View Site' to access your new website. Upon first glance, my new website resembles the demo version exactly. This experience is quite remarkable and offers a distinct advantage over downloading a theme and figuring out how to replicate the example versions.

Personalizing your Astra theme

Whether you're utilizing an imported Starter Site or starting from scratch, accessing Astra's settings from within the WordPress customizer is straightforward.

Thanks to WordPress's visual theme customizer, you have complete control to customize your site exactly as you desire, quickly and easily, without the need for any coding. The customization options are neatly organized into sections such as Sidebar, Header, Footer, Menus, and more, as depicted in the screenshot. The multitude of customization options within each section is impressive.

For instance, if you opt for the header section, you can experiment with different layout options. As you make modifications, you'll immediately see these changes reflected in the live preview of your site. In this example, I've selected the e-commerce theme 'BrandStore' and included a preview of how it appears in the demo version. With just a few clicks, I've adjusted the text and added a new image.

By upgrading to Astra Pro, you can further enhance the Astra theme and unlock additional features.

Assistance, cocumentation, and tutorial resources

No matter how excellent a product may be, users often encounter challenges or have inquiries that need addressing. It can be immensely frustrating to begin using a new theme only to find that setup becomes difficult due to inadequate documentation.

Thankfully, Brainstorm Force's documentation is extensive. Their knowledgebase is vast, and to enhance understanding, articles include annotated screenshots, with some accompanied by video tutorials. Additionally, they offer video documentation on their YouTube channel.

Given the breadth of features, it's impossible to cover every aspect in detail within a single review. However, you should now have a solid overview of what Astra offers and feel confident in utilizing this theme, recognizing its ease of customization and extension.

To conclude, let's delve into financial considerations.