User reviews
Choosing a WordPress theme for your business website or a blogging website is a challenging endeavor. You will find many themes available in the market today, and it is nearly impossible to determine which is the best.
You may find one theme, which might look great, but when you begin using it, you will get to know it is not precisely what you like.
Still, many theme developers suggest their own theme framework, which is not even a great option because, after a few years, the framework is more likely to be out of date because of a lack of regular updates. That’s why it’s essential to pick a theme that will exist for many years.
Astra is a fully customized, lightweight, and WooCommerce-ready and multipurpose WordPress theme made by Brainstorm Force. The theme has more than one active installation on the WordPress repository and has sustained a great five-star rating on thousands of reviews.
In this Astra theme review, we will take a closer look at its unique and amazing features, user experience, flexibility, performance, pricing and finish up by offering you our unbiased opinion on whether or not it is worth your investment.
Click on “open” if you want to see exactly what we will talk about in the rest of this article.
Quick Overview
What is Astra?
Astra is a fast, multipurpose, and fully customizable WordPress theme you can use for creating any website. It is popular for having a clean code and being extremely lightweight out of the box. The complete Astra theme is less than 50KB after it is installed.
The main Astra theme is totally free, but there is also an Astra Premium version where you can unlock the fullest potential of the theme. Keep in mind that the Premium Astra theme is exactly a WordPress plugin, which enables you to install it along with the free theme to extend its customization options, theme functionality, and other things.
Astra theme designed with Native AMP Support, Integrated Schema mode, and they provide unique templates that work smoothly with all common and popular visual drag-and-drop page builders such as Visual Composer, Beaver Builder, and Elementor, among others.
Astra specifications
| Features | Wordpress theme |
| Best suited for | Individuals, Freelancers, Small businesses |
| Website languages | English |
| Website URL | Visit official website |
| Support link | Support page |
| Live chat | No |
| Company address | Brainstorm Force, Vasant Utsav, Opp Shell Petrol, Rajiv Gandhi Infotech Park, Hinjewadi, Pune, MH, 411057, India |
| Year founded | 2017 |
Pricing
Astra pricing: How much does Astra cost?
Astra Premium comes in three different plans, which start at $59 for the Pro. The Mini Agency license offers access to added demo sites, while the Agency Bundle offers access to premium plugins such as Convert Pro and Schema Pro. Compared to other premium themes out there, Astra Pro enables you to use it on unlimited websites along with a single license. It is extremely economical, especially if you’re a developer or designer who wishes to utilize the same theme on numerous websites.
| Pricing range | From $49 to $249 per year |
| Pricing types | Annual subscription / Lifetime payment |
| Free plan | Yes |
| Free trial | No |
| Money back guarantee | Yes, 14 days |
| Pricing page link | See plans |
Astra pricing plans
The core Astra theme is accessible for free at the WordPress repository. Are you getting serious about using the theme on all your site? We feel you must get the Astra premium plugin to make your website more customizable. Keep in mind that the free version does not offer you as many settings in the WordPress Customizer, not to mention you will miss out on the pre-made Site Library. Note that the premium version is relatively reasonable, and they provide three license options that offer you access to the same content. The Astra Pro Plan will cost you $47 per year. The Essential Bundle will cost $169 per year, while the Agency Bundle will cost you $249 per year. One of the best parts of getting the Astra premium plan is that you can utilize it on unlimited websites without any restrictions.
Astra PRO
The plan will cost you $47 per year rather than spending $59. The plan also comes with all premium modules, more than twenty starter WordPress templates, live chat support, and unlimited website usage.
Essential Bundle
The plan will cost you $169 per year instead of spending $276. The Astra Mini Agency bundle plan comes with more than fifty-five premium agency templates, all premium modules, WordPress portfolio plugin, and ultimate add-ons for Beaver or Elementor page builder.
Agency Bundle
The plan will cost you $249 per year. It comes with everything provided by Brainstorm Force. On top of that, the Astra Agency bundle provides all premium modules, more than fifty-five premium templates, extensive training, Convert pro plugin, Schema pro plugin, and all page builder add-ons for free. How awesome is that? When it comes to its refund policy, every Astra premium plan comes with a fourteen-day money-back guarantee. That only indicates that if you buy Astro PRO and are not happy with theme performance, you can get your money back within fourteen days. Astra theme also provides a thirty percent discount on their premium theme add-ons plugins. Ensure you always check their latest discount deal.
Who Should Use It
Who Should Use Astra?
Astra theme is ideal for both beginners and professional web developers. It provides a wide array of simple features that are relatively easy to use but offer you full control over your website’s functionality and appearance. With Astra theme, you can be confident that your website will do well on all devices.
A lot of WordPress users often experience the problem that it can be challenging to tweak the design of a theme based on their preferences. Fortunately, you don’t need to think about that on Astra.
That’s because you can smoothly activate the Astra Starter Sites plugin to import different pre-built website designs. Also, you will find more than 180 designs accessible and find pre-made options for online shops, blogs, portfolios, and many more.
For most, that’s one of the ideal reasons to use Astra, as it makes it 180 WordPress themes in one. Astra was made so beginners and newbies alike can create professional-looking sites without writing any code. Still, the theme is made with developers in mind.
It is set for custom post types and supports WooCommerce too. The theme follows WCAG 2.0 standards and follows the best SEO practices. The theme’s design is both translation-ready and RTL too.
Filters and hooks enable developers to simply include content in websites. Meanwhile, non-developers can utilize the free Astra Hooks plugin, making it simple to include unique content and code to your site.
Who is eligible to use Astra?
You see, the Astra WordPress theme is perfect for businesses that want a professional-looking website with a huge amount of textual content. You can utilize that template for your personal blog, as well, even though it’s particularly made for business sites that need high-quality texts and the newest features.
Further, it comes in two different types: Astra Pro and Astra free, each with its set of package features to offer.
The thing that makes Astra unique from other designs is its natural support for different famous WordPress page builders. If you are not confident about what a page builder is, it’s one of the most effective design solutions to utilize for your site.
With a convenient drag-and-drop functionality and organized control panel, an admin user can make pages, blog posts, and other crucial content elements without requiring you to step out of the WordPress Admin Panel.
It is also fair to say that you will get full control over every element without having to mess around with codes using a Page Builder. That’s one of the best ways to edit your content in WordPress. That feature might be extremely useful to people who are not technically inclined.
In addition, the Astra theme incorporates page builders like WPBakery Page Builder, Thrive Architect, Beaver Builder, Divi Builder, and other top-voted page builders. It’s helpful for two reasons: it makes your site simple to change and customize, and it lowers the need for developers by minimizing technical stuff.
Features
Astra features: What can you do with it?
The goal of a multipurpose theme is to make it simple for you to personalize your website and make a good-looking website with a page builder. Astra utilizes the default WordPress Customizer for its theme customization.
Along with the Astra Pro add-on, you will receive access to nineteen different premium modules to save a huge amount of time creating and crafting work for your site, making that purchase more valuable.
How awesome is that?
Here are a few essential features you need to know before using the Astra Pro theme.
Designed with page builder compatibility
Did you know that Astra was made with in-built page builder compatibility? Many of its starter websites are made with Elementor or Beaver Builder, which are the two most popular page builders in the market today.
The theme is compatible with page builders as well, and that makes it a good option and convenient for busy agencies or developers with amateur experience.
Starter websites
Remember that your Astra theme will also come with a tag-along plugin referred to as Astra Starter Sites. After you install and activate your theme, you get access to over 180 pre-built website templates that are mostly free.
What makes this so awesome is that they are not only single-page templates. These are 100% functional sites that have the essential features, pages, and plugins bundled into a single package.
Deep customization
As mentioned many times in this review, Astra is highly customizable without losing any speed. That’s one of the crucial reasons Astra became so preferred and popular. You can craft a massive website complete with custom layouts, posts, images, drag-and-drop functions, and experience less than a second load time. That is difficult to beat.
With the paid version, the extended customization features deal with every element of the platform. You can tweak the site’s layout options, create custom typography, and do other things on any part of your site.
Even with the theme’s free version, you will have a huge amount of customization features, and that makes the theme one of the most generous free themes for developing WordPress sites available.
It’s worth mentioning as well that Astra features a customizer that provides users with a set of options. For instance, you can tweak the main theme colors, adjust page and post layouts, use Google Fonts, and so much more. There are even header, sidebar, and footer widget customization options.
Many themes out there enable you to upload your brand logo, and that is the end of it. Luckily, Astra goes way beyond that. You can add your logo to the left or right of the main menu and center it right above the menu.
Further, the theme enables you to tweak your logo width and upload various versions for retina and mobile displays.
Plugin integrations
The Astra developers have guaranteed that their theme is compatible with the most famous plugins. The theme works well with most page builders, and it features a sidebar by default. However, that could be personalized and removed to guarantee a full-width layout on the pages and other content types or even across your whole website.
With that in mind, if you are making an ecommerce site, Astra is an excellent option to utilize for your online store. For instance, the theme is made on the WooCommerce default options to offer you better control over your product pages and the entire look of your store. Further, the theme supports the plugin Easy Digital Downloads if you only have downloadable products.
Even for those making a website in the online learning space, Astra seamlessly integrates with LMS plugins and LearnDash.
Version improvements
Since the Astra version 2.0, the team at Brainstorm Force reworked the customizer to make it smooth and easy to personalize and design your site. Its performance and usability features have been substantially enhanced, and we will see more of that in the future.
Astra starter sites
One way how Astra soars beyond its competitors is that it provides a massive library of pre-built templates that utilize various page builders like Gutenberg, Brizy, Beaver Builder, or elementor.
Starting your website development process with Astra Starter Sites saves you the effort and stress of thinking over making complicated layouts. You also have to tweak the demo site’s content and visuals. But even with that, you can also make a good-looking site within a short time frame.
Imports are fast and smooth with all the necessary plugins installed and automatically initiated. An excellent feature in that line that stands out is you can import a whole website at a-go than opposed to a single page. That is the normal practice with other themes. That also saves you long hours on end in WordPress.
Another good feature is that once you install a starter site through the starter templates plugin from Astra, you get automatic access to the whole Pixabay library straight from your media library. That saves you a huge amount of your time used to look for stock images for your site.
Quality documentation
It is stressful when you begin with a fresh theme only to find out that there’s a big struggle to make your website because of the theme’s poor documentation. Luckily, Astra provides a different case because of its knowledge base, which is very comprehensive.
Many of the articles that you will find on their knowledge base offer video tutorials, and others have annotated screenshots. That is both helpful and essential to users of the theme as it guarantees that you utilize the needed feature and get all the benefits the theme has to provide.
There is also even a whole section on Astra’s documentation about assisting you to get Astra looking how you like it to look through custom code snippets, which could be included in your website.
Well-coded
When creating a website, even if you choose to use a page builder to create a major portion of your site, it’s a best practice to utilize a well-coded theme as your backbone or structure
Astra is established on Automattic’s Underscore themes. That is the foundation for many recent WordPress themes. That indicates you can be confident that the code for that theme is designed and planned out tidily and logically.
Since it came from Underscores, that also means that Astra owns most features than an accessibility-ready theme has, only save a few. For instance, navigation links on keyboard usage and underlined links are the content. On the other hand, Astra provides submenus as keyword accessible, and the user could utilize breadcrumbs for smooth navigation.
The theme also provides various themes hooks that benefit developers who wish to add their content. On top of that, Astra supports schema markup that supports your site SEO.
Fast load speed
Another reason why Astra loads fast is that the theme does not employ jQuery. How fast your finished website will depend on other aspects like your hosting of choice and the plugins utilized. Astra even provides the capability for you to fetch Google fonts to your site and keep them on your server locally.
The outcome of that is you will strengthen your Core Web Vital Score and the font loading speed as well.
The reason that works is that every time you use Google Fonts on your site, it asks a request being delivered to Google to fetch that specific font whenever a page or post is loaded. The effect of that on your CLS points in connection to the Core Web Vitals is dangerous.
To help with that, the Astra theme comes along with a Self-Google font feature. All you need to do is to allow that feature.
Conclusion
Astra review: Why you should use it?
After reading this Astra theme review, you might be contemplating if it is worth $47 per year.
Of course, it’s worth every of your dollar! Astra is one of the best and fastest-loading WordPress themes on the market. From only $47 per year, it offers you superior theme support, hundreds of new layout and styling options, and so much more.
What’s more, the theme supports all trendy drag-and-drop page builders, optimization for fast-loading websites, native support for WooCommerce, SEO-friendly Schema code, and a lot more.
For people who are seeking a full-customizable WordPress theme with a fast loading speed, there’s no doubt that Astra is the suggested theme for blogging-based sites.
You can download it directly from WordPress.org, then buy and install the Astra Premium plugin to get started.
What are the advantages of Astra?
It is true that Astra’s free version must be all that’s needed to run a successful and effective blog. Later on, you’ll like to take a look at the Pro features and choose if you like to bring it to the next level. Here are some of the highlights that make Pro worth the investment.
Scroll to the top link
It may seem irrelevant, but if you want to write meaty posts, it is good to provide your readers with a fast way to navigate back to the top page.
Loads of extra Astra sites
You will find 64 Astra websites accessible to Pro members. The free websites can certainly help you get started. But if you wish to do a business out of creating professional sites, that’s certainly a must-have.
Integrate with Lifter LMS and LearnDash
Selling online courses is the rage today, and with a good reason. That’s because it is a good way to reach your audience and present excellent value on demand. You can prefer to host the courses on your website or utilize an external service such as Teachable.
Do you prefer to self-host? You can easily find two leaders of the pack in this realm: Lifter LMS and LearnDash. You see, Astra offers special integrations with those tools to ensure they look seamless and beautiful with the rest of your website experience.
More blog layouts
Just staring at the unlimited flow of blog posts could be tedious. Why don’t you spice it with Masonry views, bespoke columns, and great tricks with Astra Pro?
Transparent headers
That’s a glitzy skill you will observe on extremely professional platforms. Would you like to add a stunning photo that spans your whole screen? Transparent headers could make your image pop even more for your whole readers.
Now, we want to hear from you. Have you tried the Astra theme before? How was your experience with it? Let us know in the comment section. If you have more concerns about the WordPress theme, let us know!
Alternatives
Astra Alternatives
Before subscribing to Astra, it’s always a good idea to check out the competition and find the best wordpress themes for your needs. You can find the Astra alternatives here.
Here are some versus to compare Astra with its competitors:
