Planning to buy a premium WordPress theme for your website? Searching for Astra theme reviews to find if it fits your needs?
If so, your search probably ends here. Today, we’re going to Astra theme and share our honest experience with you.
As a WordPress user, you will get unlimited premium-quality themes on online marketplaces. Spanning across different categories, they open endless opportunities for you. But not all themes have equal qualities.
What are the main qualities you should consider while choosing a WordPress theme?
Speed?
Flexibility?
Security?
Responsiveness?
All of them. They all have equal importance in building a fast and SEO-friendly websites. In many cases, the theme performance will decrease with the increase in the number of features. So you should carefully choose a theme that can meet your requirements without sacrificing the quality.
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Table of Contents
What is Astra?
Astra is one of the fastest WordPress themes at this time. It is stable and comes with tons of options to customize each part. Having more than 1,000,000 customers, Astra is definitely the most popular theme for WordPress websites.
Astra lets you customize almost anything on your site. Create a transparent header, set margins, change page layouts, and much more. It is page builder friendly and offers several stunning templates to launch your website in a few minutes. Thus it will save your time.
You can also change fonts and colors, manage layouts for each page type, and even hide meta to apply a custom look to your pages. Astra also allows you to set a different logo and apply custom styles for mobile devices. Since most of your visitors are coming from smartphones, it is really essential to make your site mobile-friendly to get more traffic.
Due to the unlimited settings, you may think that Astra’s theme size is too high. Right?
If so, you are wrong. It weighs less than 50 kb and loads in less than 0.5 seconds with the default theme data.
Feeling weird?
Astra is super light-weight and designed to deliver ultimate performance on desktop as well as mobiles. It is clean and built with Vanilla JavaScript to ensure a smooth loading experience on your pages. It is SEO-friendly and best for all website types like WooCommerce stores, e-learning portals, blogs, etc.
Click here to buy Astra Pro with up to 20% off and create a lightning fast website in minutes (14-days money-back guarantee)
Astra Free vs Astra Pro
Astra is the most popular free theme on WordPress.Org. It is downloaded more than 1 million times and got 5 star rating from over 5k reviewers. This is the only one non-official WordPress.org theme that crossed 1 million installations till this time.
Comparing to Astra Pro, the free version has limited settings. So you can’t customize it as you need. Take a look at the following table to find how Astra free differs from the pro version,
| Features | Astra Free | Astra Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Responsive | Yes | Yes |
| SEO-friendly | Yes | Yes |
| Schema integrated | Yes | Yes |
| Site layouts | Yes | Yes |
| Starter templates | Yes | Yes |
| Header builder | Yes | Yes |
| Footer builder | Yes | Yes |
| Google & custom fonts | Yes | Yes |
| Multiple navigation menus | Yes | Yes |
| AMP friendly | Yes | Yes |
| Page buidler friendly | Yes | Yes |
| Typography | Limited | Full |
| Colors and backgrounds | Limited | Full |
| Spacing | Limited | Full |
| WooCommerce | Limited | Full |
| LifterLMS | Limited | Full |
| LearnDash | Limited | Full |
| Easy Digital Downloads | Limited | Full |
| Styling settings | No | Yes |
| Layout settings | No | Yes |
| Custom header & footer | No | Yes |
| Custom 404 page | No | Yes |
| Multiple page headers | No | Yes |
| Mega menu | No | Yes |
| Header & footer elements | No | Yes |
| Blog settings | No | Yes |
| Author box | No | Yes |
| Featured image control | No | Yes |
| White label | No | Yes |
| 24/7 premium support | No | Yes |
Astra free theme is a good option for beginners. It helps you to test the theme quality before buying the full version. But Astra Pro is fully customizable and designed to skyrocket your website speed. It is best for bloggers, online stores, educational institutions, and others to create blazing fast websites and make a stable income.
Click here to buy Astra Pro with up to 20% off and setup a money-making machine with WordPress (14-days money-back guarantee)
Pricing
Astra has three types of subscription plans- Astra Pro, Toolkit, and Business Toolkit.
Astra Pro— $59/yr
Essential Toolkit (Everything in Astra Pro, plus)– $79/yr (Lifetime- $399)
Business Toolkit ((Everything in Essential Bundle, plus) –$149/yr (Lifetime- $599)
| There are separate plans for single, 10. and 1000 websites. For instance, Astra Pro for a single website is priced at $59/year. If you want to install it on 10 websites, it will cost $79 per year ($399 for lifetime), and for 1000 websites, you should pay either $89 a year or $599 as one-time charges. In the same way, you will find different pricing for Essential Toolkit and Business Toolkit as well. |
Click here to buy Astra Pro with up to 50% off and create a fully customizable website for your business (14-days money-back guarantee)
Astra Review 2024: 9 Reasons to Choose Astra Theme for Your Website
Let us check the top reasons for choosing Astra theme,
1. Performance
I am using Astra Pro on BloggingTriggers. So I don’t need to create a demo site to test the theme performance. My site is hosted on HostArmada and I am using WP Rocket for caching. But I deactivated this premium caching plugin for this testing purpose. Instead, I installed LiteSpeed cache plugin for optimization. It is a free plugin.
I run a GTMetrix speed test and this is the report, it generated.
It is fully loaded in 194 milliseconds with 100% performance score and positive signals from Google Core Web Vitals. Not showing any issues relating to theme loading, static assets, DOM size, and others.
Now we can scross-check this statistics with Pingdom,
My site is mobile-friendly and light-weight. It got B 82 performance grade with 550.9 KB size. The approximate loading time is 1 sec with 35 requests. Since image lazy loading is enabled on the site, they will take some more moments to load. That’s why you are not seeing them in the screenshot.
Astra follows best coding practices to serve content faster. It also uses Vanilla JavaScript to prevent render blocking JQuery warnings and load pages smoothly.
2. Layouts
Astra offers multiple layouts for your archives, blog posts, and pages. Choose from boxed, content boxed, full width contained, or full width streteched layouts to customize your page type appearance.
It lets you change width for each page type, set spacing, display or hide excerpts, and much more. Astra works seamlessly with popular page builders such as Elementor, Beaver Builder, Brizy and Gutenberg.
Growth Bundle customers will get ultimate addons for Elementor and ultimate addons for Beaver builder (Any one plugin for Essential Bundle customers) to unlock more features.
Theys will also get WP Portfolio (gallery), Convert Pro (lead generation/boost conversions), Schema Pro (Scheme markup) and all plugins developed by Brainstorm Force (Astra theme developers) in the future.
3. Customization
Astra has unlimited customization options to manage any part, from the header to the footer. After activating Astra theme and Astra Pro plugin, you will see options (Appearance > Astra options) like this,
It will display various Pro modules to manage header, typography, menu, and more. Activate required modules to change default settings.
Head to Appearance > Customize to manage Astra theme.
Open each section to find relevant settings. Astra’s live customizer will help you to see changes in real-time. If satisfied with the preview, you can apply those settings to the front-end immediately.
These are the various settings you will find under each header,
Global: Typography, colors, container, layouts, and buttons
Header: Site identity, primary header, primary menu, above header, below header, sticky header, and transparent header
Blog: Blog/archive, blog layouts, and single post
Sidebar: Sidebar layouts and width
Footer: Footer widgets and footer bar
It will also contain options to change typography, background color, and spacing in each section. Click Blog to customize your blog and single posts. Firstly, let us customize your blog page.
There are three blog layouts on Astra Pro. Choose a layout from the top. Set how many columns you want to display.
Check ‘Add space between posts’ to create a space between your posts. It also allows you to create Pinterest-like layouts using the Masonry layout option. Select ‘Highlight first post’ to make your latest post featured.
Scroll-down to manage your post structure and hide unwanted metadata from the page.
Click the eye icon on the meta data to display or hide it in your page. Scroll-down again to set your pagination type, font type, color, and spacing.
Hit the Publish button to save changes. Click on the back arrow to go back to the previous settings on your customizer. Choose Single posts.
Similar to blog page layouts, click on the eye icon to show or hide meta data on your single posts. Astra theme allows you to display author box without installing any plugins. Select ‘Author info’ to activate the option.
Scroll-down again to change your title font type, color, and set margins to single post layouts. It is also possible to bulk edit Astra meta settings and export customizer settings from one site to another, etc.
4. Hooks & Filters
Do you want to insert tracking scripts, short code and custom code in different parts of the site?
Brainstorm Force has developed a simple plugin to insert codes from the header through content to the fotter. Install Astra Hooks on your website and it will add a new section to your customizer. Open Hooks to quickly insert codes in various parts of your theme.
5. Starter templates
Astra Pro and Agency bundles come with a huge number of starter templates that you can install in one-click. They are full website packs and best for businesses, professionals, agencies, and others.
Install Starter Templates on your site to import your favorite templates easily. Choose a template category and page builder type from the top to filter results.
Click a template to view demo or import (either full site or the home page template only). Astra Pro users can import up to 20 starter templates and Essential Bundle users can import all 180+ premium templates to manage different types of sites.
Do you want to create a professional-quaility header and footer for your website? Astra Pro allows you to create a unique header and footer with drag & drop abilities.
There are three ways to insert elements in your header. Above header, primary header, and below header. Click on the header layout and it will show various elements that you can add to the top section. They include social icons, buttons, HTML codes, widgets, and others.
Choose an element to insert it in your site’s header. Once it added, click on the label to view its customization settings on the left side. You can change its width, colors, assign borders and shadows, and even hide it from mobiles.
Similar to other parts, Astra gives you full freedom in designing headers and footers also. You can create a separate header for mobiles and make a navigation sticky so it follows readers as they scroll up and down through the page.
Footer builder is another advantage of Astra Pro. Just like the header, you can build a stylish footer by adding new blocks to it.
Astra allows you to place footer elements in these areas- above footer, primary footer, and below footer. Drag and drop them to re-order and customize each element to change appearance or set spacing.
On the bottom-left corner, you will see options to watch real-time previews for various device types. So you can quickly know how your header or footer appears on mobiles and make changes instantly.
7. Unlimited websites
You can use Astra themes on unlimited websites. Whether you are going to create a business website, eCommerce portal, blog or something else, you don’t need to buy separate themes to beautify all those sites.
Astra is enough to power up 10 or even 1000 websites you have. Since it offers several built-in templates, you can adopt different styles for each site to apply a custom look to them. Flexibility is another key feature of Astra themes so you can customize it to any extent to match various business types.
8. Fast customer support
Astra provides a fast one-to-one customer support in all subscription plans. Create support requests and someone from their customer care will attend them as early as possible.
It also offers 14-days money back guarantee to customers. Install and use Astra for free during this period, if you are not satisfied, contact their customer support and ask for a refund. They will either fix your complaints, or issue a full refund. So there is no risk in buying a Astra premium package.
9. Pricing
Astra Pro is affordable. It costs $59/yr. Considering its unique features and unlimited domain usage, it is a reasonable rate. Moreover, Brainstorm Force make consistent theme updates to make Astra more secure and add new features to boost your website performance.
Their Essential Bundle is priced at $169 and Growth Bundle at $249 per year. They are packed with over 180 premium website templates and added features.
If you are looking for a one-time payment solution to avoid annual recurring billing, it is also possible with Astra. Their lifetime plan costs $299, $849, and $1249 respectively for Astra Pro, Essential Bundle, and Growth Bundle plans. This will help you to avoid the occasional increase in subscription rates and make a good investment for the future.
Final Thoughts
Astra is my favorite WordPress theme. It is lightning fast and fully customizable. The theme is perfect for creating company websites, money making blogs, eCommerce shop, etc.
You’ll get access to several professional-quality website templates to launch your dream site in less than 5 minutes. Otherwise, head to Astra theme modules and settings to build a design from scratch. No developing knowledge is required to create an SEO-optimized website using Astra Pro. It is super easy to use.
Click here to buy Astra Pro with up to 20% off and create a highly customizable, light-weight website in minutes (14 days money-back guarantee)
FAQ
Astra
Astra is faster and light-weight. It is one of the best WordPress themes I have used so far. Being highly flexible, you can use Astra for any website type and change almost anything on the design.
There are unlimited settings to manage the header, navigation menu, content area, sidebar, and footer. You’ll get full control over the theme to change colors, typography, backgrounds, and more. No limits. Do whatever you want. It is truly powerful than you may imagine.
I am using Astra Pro on all websites. Recently, I upgraded to their lifetime plan to avoid annual renewals. Here’s the proof,
Astra is awesome, fast, and customizable. They have a friendly customer support also. If you have any questions or complaints, they will take maximum efforts to fix things.
14-days money-back guarantee
Astra provides a 14-day money-back guarantee in all subscription plans. If somehow you don’t like this amazing theme, contact customer support and seek a refund. They will issue a full refund, whatever may be the reason.
Their money-back guarantee is just like a free theme trial. So there is no risk in testing Astra Pro.
Do you have any questions? Feel free to share your honest feedback and raise questions if any, through the comment form below.
