Astra Theme Review 2023: Is Astra Really Worth ?

Astra Theme Review | WordPress theme

Summary

Overall, Astra is a lightweight, SEO-friendly and fast loading theme that’s the reason the Astra has grown so quickly and maintains a 5/5 star rating based on 5000+  reviews at WordPress.org. Astra theme comes with flexibility and wide range of features. Here you will read our honest review of Astra theme which is based on our experience.

5
5/5
Astra theme screenshot

Lot of questions come to mind related to WordPress themes, while building a website. Which is absolutely Ok ! Selecting the right theme for business websites / blogs is not an easy task.

Choosing a theme without any information about their performance is not a wise decision. 

Here, review is must!

I had also read Astra theme review before installing it on my website. In the initial days I used the free version and after sometime bought the Astra Pro version when I found their performance is up to the mark. 

Theme is the most important part of the website. So you need to think twice before using any theme on your website. 

Most of the time developers suggest to use their own theme framework. If the developer is known then it looks cool, but problems occur after two or three years when the theme is outdated because of lack of regular updates. So be aware of those themes and frameworks which are going to exist for years. 

There are countless themes, which look good but after using them realize that it is not your cup of tea. Genius is always aware of it! 

It is the era of Astra themes. 

But why?

Well, you will find it soon…

Astra theme is one of the popular themes in WordPress. It saves time and gives you better options and templates as compared to regular different themes.

Today, I will help you to decide whether Astra is that theme which end your search. Here I have shared my detailed review of the Astra WordPress theme lets read: 

Quick note: Affiliate product’s links are embedded in this page. If you buy any product through these affiliate links, then we will earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. Thanking you for your kind support, it will help me to keep producing honest reviews. Read more

Astra theme introduction

Astra is a well-known 5-star multipurpose theme that was set up and launched in 2017 by Brainstorm force.

It is the highest-ranking theme in WordPress, with active users of over 800000 sites.

You can create professional websites by using Starter Templates or either create your website with your own design on the scratch. Through visual theme customizer, you can make a website exactly which you want. 

Provides better demo websites and templates to look for. Whether it is any site related to different areas of knowledge like food, technology, medical, or any other areas. Astra theme suits everyone. 

Reasons to use Astra WordPresses Theme

We know Astra theme is more popular than other themes, but the question is, what are the features that make it so popular? In this section, let’s read some points that makes Astra WordPress theme better than other themes;

Fast Performance

The performance of your website depends on the theme chosen by you. How your website is performing on search engines is the crucial factor to get higher ranking.

First thing that you need to focus on while buying any theme for your website, is its Performance optimization. 

When we talk about Performance optimization, Astra  is considered as one of the fastest WordPress theme. It helps websites to load faster to get more traffic as compared to slower ones. 

page load speed

This is one of the biggest reasons why many people use the Astra theme over any other. 

Customization Option

As I have already mentioned above that Astra is a multipurpose WordPress theme with 5 start rating, which means you can easily use Astra theme for blog, eCommerce store, online course and any other business website.

Customizer settings gives you ton of options to control your website:

  • Site Identity
  • Menu
  • Colors
  • Typography
  • Blog 
  • Footer Builder
  • Sidebar
  • Content width
  • Additional CSS
  • Etc.

These customization settings and many more other options are available for both versions Free or Premium. In the Premium version you will get some additional features. 

The Customizer settings are the easiest option to customize your site. In your wordpress dashboard you can see a dedicated settings page under Appearance > customize.

Here you can manage all controls related to the Astra theme and Astra Pro Addon.

As it provides you various options and layouts that you choose and later on change, modify and update them. To expand the functionality, Astra comes with a list of additional plugins. You can activate any plugin according to your website requirement. 

We use plugins to add extra features and functionality on our website. Astra theme allows all plugins to connect to it. And provides some free plugins for the website to make it better responsive and SEO friendly.

Page Builder Astra Integration

You can create a site by simply using the Drag and drop option with the help of WordPress page builder plugins. Astra beautifully pairs with WordPress builder plugins.

Some of them are;

– Gutenberg block library: it is a tool that works in free version too while using this library you can customize your site, by adding buttons, prices, testimonials, or any other.

– Beaver Builder: from Beaver Builder, you will get 60+ custom modules that help you to customize your site very easily. It also includes 40 full demo websites to easily create readymade websites.

– Elementors: while using this we can get tons of themes, widgets and 100 readymade templates for all niches.

Whenever you create a site or just a page of it, Astra theme provide you many options regarding all things. It also help you to control canvas for your page builder.

Looks Amazing

Astra WordPress theme provides so many wonderful templates, you can use according to your niche and work upon it. You can change and update some of it by using the different templates as per your requirement.

Provides a wide variety of options, helping users to define their website more likely the way they wanted. It opens new options as compared to other themes with limited templates or options.

Easy For Beginners

As the growth of the internet is at its peak, everyone needs a website to showcase their work, whether it’s related to business, service, or any other. 

Many beginners want to use the Astra theme over others because they find it less difficult and easy to use to proceed with their work. That’s  why the Astra theme has the most rated theme.

Astra theme became one of the most popular and used themes in WordPress

One of the FASTEST Themes

Undoubtedly Astra is the right theme for your website, because it  ensures fastness, security of website and reliability. It takes merely less than 0.5 seconds to load the website.

Page loading speed is the most IMPORTANT FACTOR for any website to rank on search engines like Google. 

Your website visitors, Search Engines and yes you too, do not like slow loading websites. Poor loading websites badly affects the user experience and decreases your website engagement rate.  

Did you know both free and Pro versions of Astra are built for high speed ?

So, initially you can use the free version of Astra and explore its features before buying its pro version. It is a well-coded theme that uses vanilla JavaScript, so it is very relevant for beginners to use.

Utilize It On Unlimited Websites

The next benefit you will get while using the Astra theme is unlimited sites with many customization options.

Through Astra free version you can build both WordPress and WooCommerce websites. You can use the theme on multiple websites without any hindrance.

For more features, you can purchase Astra Pro, which can extend the Free theme with extra plugins. 

Seo-Friendly Theme

We all want SEO-friendly website that generates more traffic. SEO is the heartbeat of any successful website. 

Yes, you can get traffic on your website through paid ads. But paid ads are costly, so you can’t pay tons of money to get one time traffic on your site. So focus on SEO, it will take your efforts and time but results are marvelous. 

SEO provides organic traffic on your website which will successfully convert into conversion. The code written in the Astra theme fulfils the requirement of SEO over other themes. Currently, it is the best theme if you want to rank high in Google SEO.

Starter Sites

Most of the time I have observed that business owners or bloggers who want to build their website don’t have time and knowledge to design their websites from scratch.

To help people, Astra includes beautiful pre-built demo sites which can easily imported by few clicks.

Perfect thing which I like the most in Astra’s starter templates is the use of page builder or the native WordPress block editor to built them.

Astra theme provides 200+ demo websites to their users. This makes a beginner’s work easier, as they use any of them according to their niche and  features.

Just tab and change, update, modify according to you.

Is that simple? Yes, this is all very simple, you just need to give it a try.

Additional Plugins With Astra Premium

Astra theme provides some additional plugins within their premium plan. Basically they are modules and you can enable/disable each feature any time. 

Astra theme is lightweight and it is possible with these modules. You can simply disable features which you don’t want to use.

Tap on Appearance → Astra Options to control them and use them. See the screenshot below:

 

White Label Feature

As the name goes, the white label feature helps you to remove the name of the Astra theme, and over that, you can provide your name or brand with that.

It hides the identity of the website that is made on Astra theme and showcases your name over it.

This is a very attractive feature which is offered by Astra for their Pro users, but most of the WordPress themes are not inclusive of this feature.

Best For Commercial Websites

You wanted to start your online business, and for this, you need a website?

So you go to WordPress, decide to create a perfect website for you or maybe you hire someone to do that. Any of the factors, but  to create the best website it is always suitable to go with Astra theme only. 

Buy why?

As Astra theme gave us additional feature to add better conversion-optimized templates, some of them are;

– Infinite Scroll: load your product dynamically till the user doesn’t scroll down.

 – Grid Setting: highly customizable grid layout.

Quick view: provides you better view option to increase your conversion rate.

Dedicated Slidebars: apply slide bars anywhere you think it’s needed to boost user engagement with your site.

 – Off-canvas slidebars: other filters and widgets are available so to improve user experience 

–  Widget optimised: change your widget for product variation, price filters, and more options to view. 

These are some basic features of Astra theme that help you to create a better business website to get better traffic, and with minimum effort. And many of these options came with free version only.

Documentation of Astra

While getting any confusion regarding any part of the Astra theme, you will get several documentation to solve your issue. Like some documentation is;

How does Astra theme work?

As I have already mentioned that it works smoothly with page builders like: Elementor, Beaver Builder, and many more others.

Designing and creating is all a mindset game. How well you coordinate colours and fonts with others is the main thing. Using Astra you will get enough available samples, so can learn, convert and update them by creating a demo site

Now let’s move into the steps, how does the Astra theme work?

Install Astra Theme In WordPress

First thing you need to do is, install Astra theme on your WordPress website. Installation steps are very easy and quick. Here’s a simple tutorial for you.

Login to your WordPress Dashboard. Go to Appearance > Themes > Add New 

Now in the search box write”Astra” then click on the “Install” button to install it. Once your installation is completed you can activate the theme. That’s it, you’re done. Start your customization from widgets to header, footer, and many more.

Alternatively, you can download the Free Astra theme from here. If you want to get more features then go with Astra Pro version. 

Importing a Starter Site

After installing it you will get so many pre-built templates and demo sites. You can import them as well as  create them from scratch.

You will get free templates without any tag and premium templates as showing tags around the corner. You can import as per your choices like;

  • Specific page template to import: rather than importing the whole demo site, you can check on some pages that you require at this time.
  • Import custom settings: header, footer, layout, function anything choose as your custom setting.
  • Widget to import with templates: continue option, sign-up button, price details, any widget you can import as per the site niche.

For starters sites, you can install Starter templates plugins for better expedience. These starter sites also help in page builders integration.

Custom Features

Astra theme provides so many custom features to add to your website, without even writing a single line of code.

Custom features help you to design better sites, than normal ones that created from scratch. Many options are available with this, so you get many new ideas to make it more committable site than before.

Premium Features

If you buy the premium version of the Astra theme then you need to explore it more. More better features present in a paid version in comparison to a free one.

One of the important features you can get from the premium version is modular, from where you can enable and disable every custom feature you are using from time to time. 

You can set this option on your site,

By going to the Appearance setting option, then click on Astra option, and then modular change.

Modular that came with the premium version are;

  • Typography module
  • Navigation menus modules
  • Spacing modules
  • Headers modules
  • Footer modules

There are many other too, just you need to explore your premium version whole up and down.

Astra Speed and Performance Score

As of now we understand how Astra WordPress theme website has more features in comparison to other WordPress themes. But one of the main reasons why it is widely used is because of its high speed to load a website and the context that is included in it.

It helps search engines to know how better your site is, this creates your authority and reliability in front of it.

The performance score of Astra theme is 98% and sometimes more than that. So it is quite wonderful to get with this, as it gives you better space while improving your site.

Pros and cons of using the Astra theme

In this section, I have shared some pros and cons of using the Astra theme.

Pros:

Cons:

Pricing of Astra theme

The Astra theme free version is available on WordPress.org. If you want to use more features of this theme, then you can buy Astra Pro. You can upgrade your plan with a premium Astra theme. Astra Pro is the official plugin which enhances the free theme with new features like header options, style options, layouts and more.

Astra Pro plugin costs $59 and best thing is that you can use it on unlimited websites.

Later in this review, I will guide you to choose the best out of Astra Free and Astra Pro. Here I have clarified some doubts between the annual plan and a lifetime plan of Astra theme.  So let’s continue reading… 

Difference between annual and a lifetime plan

Upgrading it to an annual plan means you can check and use all their products unlimitedly for a full year.

You can easily upgrade or cancel your plan while answering their email, they send prior to the end of your plan.

If you don’t want to renew your plan again, you will get a free version with the benefit of prior saving modules and custom features. But you don’t get any kind of technical support.

With the lifetime Astra theme plan, you can get all the services unlimitedly and all the updates and support for lifetime by just doing a one-time payment through it.

If you want to upgrade your plan, in between any other ongoing plan, then you just need to pay the difference between those two plans.

Like if you want to upgrade from Astra pro premium lifetime version to Growth Bundle premium lifetime version then you need to pay the difference between these two (699$-250$=450$)

If you don’t like any of the versions after buying it, you can get a full refund in 14 days of buying the service. They support a full money-back policy, so don’t worry if you don’t like the theme after buying it.

But let’s hear a secret, you will love all its features, and you will not regret buying them.

Astra Free vs Pro: Which One Do You Need

As I mentioned earlier, there are two versions of Astra theme available. It is available at WordPress.org

You can use the free version or buy Astra Pro plugin, which will extends the features of the theme. 

If you are a beginner I suggest you to go with the free version before jumping into the premium one. 

Astra pro version cost you up to 59 dollars, so please be aware of the theme prior to investing in it. Because as a beginner you feel overwhelmed by getting so many options, it is hard to choose one unless you have some knowledge regarding them all.

I will suggest, take any plan according to your usability level. 

If you are an intermediate or advanced level user and want to use this theme for your own websites or your client’s website then go Astra Pro.

Are your payments secure enough ?

While updating through the premium version you can pay from PayPal or a debit/credit card.

All transactions via this method are safe and secure, Astra theme will take care of security and privacy and any personal and financial information will not be saved by them while you pay. 

You can also generate the invoice by entering your VAT number in the store account.

In the next 2 weeks (14 days within buying premium) you can get a refund also if you don’t like their service, and it is a full 100% payment guarantee back.  Full payment gets back into your account, they don’t serve any credit store.

How does the Technical support team work?

Now we know much about the Astra theme, so how can we forget to discuss its customer technical team ? Astra theme technical support team provides you three major support;

  • Free support
  • Premium Support
  • And pre-sales Query Support

While purchasing any package, you will get premium-level email support in the form of tickets. Every time you need to generate tickets to get premium-level support.

They also created different documentation for every content, which might help you solve your query easily.

If you have any further problems, it is recommended to hire a freelancer who has proper knowledge about this.

How to share an Astra theme licence?

It is not allowed to share your licence with a third person, so you just activate the plugins on your client’s website, it doesn’t show them any kind of licence key you are using. 

It is useful for your client to have their own licence, as after completion of website work or as you are not maintaining their website.

It becomes hard for them to manage because they don’t get any updates via WordPress and no technical support while using the website.

You can read the documentation that is given under the service for managing licences, it helps you get proper knowledge about licences and their requirements.

But if you are running an agency, you can grant them access to some employees or your fellow mates, but then you are responsible for your licence.

Astra theme will notify you as they find any invalid entries in your licence activation. These licence are reviewed once again, and if anything faulty is found then it is called a misused licence.

Final Thoughts on Astra WordPress Theme Review

Astra is one of the fast, compatible, and easy-to-use themes, so why wait more, check its site now and install it.

I hope you get the required information about the Astra theme and why we need to use them. So this is all about the Astra theme review 2023.

If you find any problem regarding the Astra theme or in its features, don’t hesitate to message us we will love to help you out more!

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ's)

Q1. What is the difference between Astra Pro and essential bundle?

ANS: Astra pro premium version builds to uplift the free version, so it only provides a range of some extra design tools. The essential bundle provides page builder addons, premium templates, and plugins for extra features.

Q2. What are some requirements to use Astra theme in 2023?

ANS: Some basic requirements for using Astra theme are;

  • WordPress(5.3 version or above) 
  • PHP(use 7.4 or above)
  • MYSQL or MariaDB
  • Memory limit(128 MB to 256 MB) 

Q3. Do I need to use Extra plugins while using Astra theme?

ANS: No, it’s not required. While using Astra theme you get all the starter templates in the free version only so you can create a beautiful website by using them all. 

Q4. Does Astra depend on Page Builder plugins?

ANS: It is widely used and helps the user to create a website better than simple templates. Elementor, Beaver Builder, and Gutenberg make the site more compatible than before. 

Q5. Is Astra WordPress giving truly Unlimited usage?

ANS: Yes, you will get unlimited plugins and templates in the Astra theme.

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