Are you looking for a WordPress theme that is helpful for beginners? If yes then Astra Theme completes your search. Why I am saying this I have explained the reason in detail in this Astra Theme Review 2021.
According to research, since the time the Astra theme was launched, a lot of changes have been made to it. Its updated version in 2021 has increased its beauty even more. So far more than 1,000,000 websites have taken advantage of its free version. If you want, through this you can beautifully design your favorite websites like fashion, travel, resumes, portfolios, online shops.
If you are a new blogger and want to create your kickass website on WordPress then you need to look no further than the Astra theme. Let us now move ahead in this in-depth Astra Theme Review and try to understand Astra better.
Short Note About Astra
Astra is one such WP theme that is the most liked among all WordPress themes. It is also known for its multi-purpose WordPress theme. Website owners or artists who want clean and minimal style websites, this theme provides them a simple and affordable way to design a website.
Astra was designed by Brainstorm Force. Let me tell you one thing about it: it is a WordPress development company which has been working for more than 10 years. More than 60 employees work in this company.
More recently, Astra has set a record of 1+ million active installations on WordPress.org, and its popularity has earned it 4,800+ five-star ratings. This theme is considered the 5th most popular theme on the official WordPress repository.
Astra Theme Plans & Pricing
Now I will introduce you to Astra’s plans and their prices. You will get to see 3 types of plans in this, whose names are as follows:
- Astra Pro – $49
- Essential Bundle- $169
- Growth Bundle- $249
Let us now go ahead and know about the features of these three:
Astra Pro
Astra Pro’s plan completely satisfies all types of website owners and the features available with it are also amazing. The names of these features are given below:
- Custom Layouts & Hooks
- Advance Footer Builder
- Native AMP Support
- WooCommerce Controls
- Product Updates
- Mega Menu
- Sticky Header
- Extensive Training
- Advance Header Builder
- Advance Blog Layouts
- Global Color Palettes
- Advanced Typography
- Advance Colors Options
- Premium Support
- White Label
To understand its Growth Bundle and Essential Bundle plans, you need to go through the list given below:
| Product Bundle | Essential Bundle | Growth Bundle |
| Convert Pro Plugin | No | Yes |
| Schema Pro Plugin | No | Yes |
| Unlimited Website Usage | Yes | Yes |
| Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder | Yes | Yes |
| Ultimate Addons for Elementor | Yes | Yes |
| Extensive Training | Yes | Yes |
| WP Portfolio Plugin | Yes | No |
| skillet Academy Membership | No | Yes |
| Product Updates | Yes | Yes |
| Premium Support | Yes | Yes |
Documentation
Astra’s documentation is considered to be the most extensive compared to other WordPress themes. Its team uses articles and videos to explain to its customers about the Astra theme and explains each item in expansion.
You will be surprised to know that more than 200 articles have been included in its documentation. These articles give statements about each of the features offered by Astra.
If you can cope with the Astra theme, then you will get a decent working categorized grid of menu, sidebar, and search form as index page in it.
Astra Theme Features
The features of the Astra theme are unlimited and quite advanced. So let us now know about its features in this review section:
1. Speed & Performance
It is said that the smaller the code for the website, the better it is considered, so the Astra theme has been specially designed keeping its speed in mind.
Astra’s code is very small which means 50KB which is very little as compared to other WordPress themes. Due to such a short code, it scores well in speed tests like Google Page Insights, Pingdom, and GTmetrix.
If bloggers want, they can add images and videos to their blogs without any worries because they are not going to have any problem with page loading in the future.
2. Customizer Options
The best advantage of Customizer Options is that you can explore the options for modifying aspects of the theme directly through it.
In these options, you will see that the sections like Customization Options Layout, Menu, Color/Background, Background Images, Typography, Buttons, etc. have been well organized.
You can easily go deeper into this optimization process and it also allows you to increase the radius of “read more”.
3. Header & Footer Sections
There are so many WordPress themes available in the online market, out of which Astra’s header and footer options are the best and it makes it much easier to personalize the header and footer of the website as compared to other themes.
If you have a website on WordPress, then you can add many footer bars to it. Also, if you want, you can decide what you want to send in the header and footer, such as text or widget.
This is the owner of a unique transparent header. You can easily customize the transparent header through images and colors.
4. Custom Layouts
Astra Theme’s offer of flexible custom layouts is amazing. These custom layouts are capable of full scrolling intelligence, spacing, sizing as well as primary and secondary container placement.
It allows you to save and add 404 pages, header, hook location, and footer to your website. On the contrary, it is very easy to increase the capacity of the WordPress theme customizer by controlling the width and container of the design through the website layouts module.
5. Sidebar
Sidebar is also a very useful plugin like other plugins. It is lightweight and simplifies the process of creating and managing new sidebars such as where to display the sidebar, whether the content is boxed or full width, etc.
From here you can also disable features like page title header, footer bar, and featured images altogether. It gives complete freedom to the website owner to configure the default sidebar layout setting.
If you want to change your page’s color, background, and typography in the sidebar, you can do it easily.
6. Widgets
Widgets are used to improve user experience and drive conversions. The specialty of Astra’s widgets is that it can add three new widgets: Social Profile, Address, and List Icon.
Its main function is to provide a small fraction of information about the weather article or news on the website. Many bloggers also use it to make notes or fill out forms. You can place widgets anywhere on the backend, sidebar, or footer of your blog post.
7. Page Builder Integration
As you know, Astra is designed with built-in page compatibility from the get-go but do you know how its page builder is ready? Yes, that’s great and if not, then let me tell you about it.
Astra Theme is built from the “ground-up” to be fully compatible with the most popular page builder plugins like Divi, Elementor, Beaver Builder, etc.
If you do not know much about page builder plugins, then there is nothing to worry about because it is designed in such a way that it can be easily managed by busy agencies and less experienced developers.
Brainstorm Force has integrated Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder and Ultimate Addons for Elementor Plugin Extension so effectively which is commendable.
8. Dedicated Starter Sites
Astra theme always comes with plugin starter sites, which you can also call ready-to-use sites. Along with this, these starter sites are considered to be the right-hand side of Astra. You do not need to pay any extra to download these starter sites.
Once you have installed and activated the theme, you will see a new page in the menu of Astra sites. There you will then be given instructions to choose your preferred page builder: Gutenberg, Elementor, Breezy, or Builder.
With the activation of these starter sites, you will have complete freedom to use more than 100 pre-built website templates.
One thing you will keep in mind is that whatever design you choose like Gutenberg or Breezy, then you have to activate the page builder of the same design for it to work properly. This is because every design is made according to its page builder.
The focus of starter sites is always on how to make your website development process more efficient. It is quite famous for its work with page templates, plugins, and features.
Astra Pros & Cons
When you go to the market to get the goods and do not take anything without checking there properly, in the same way in this online market world it would be unwise to select a theme without hitting it.
The best way to check any theme is to know about its advantages and disadvantages, and on this basis, here I am going to explain its advantages and disadvantages through points. Which is as follows:
Pros:
- No other theme can beat Astra in creativity and customization.
- Its custom layouts are loaded with tons of options.
- This theme is fast as well as lightweight.
- The flexibility of its Mega Menu feature is amazing.
- It has many free and paid demo sites for all types of customers.
Cons:
- If you buy its free version then the features will be very limited.
- The Archive Page Styling found in this is very minor.
- Pro-addon is required to unlock its features.
- It can be said that the Astra Pro version is slightly more expensive than GeneratePress and OceanWP.
Is It An Ideal Theme For Beginners?
I know that the new bloggers who must be wondering whether this theme will prove to be an ideal theme for their website or not, then let me tell them that this theme is very helpful for beginners. It has all the features that will be required for beginner bloggers to grow their websites on the Google search engine.
The world has become very digital in 2021 and almost 70% of people have a smartphone. They do all their work and search mobile-only. So this theme is 100% mobile-friendly.
If you want to make your content look different and attractive from other bloggers, then you will get responsive Google fonts in it, through which you can change the background design of your page.
To ensure that your website performs well in front of your readers, Astra uses vanilla JavaScript, which prevents rendering jQuery from getting in the way.
If you want to create such a website in which you can sell your products, then for this work the facility of WooCommerce plugin has also been provided in it.
Final Thought About Astra Theme
To date, I have given reviews about many themes but I found Astra very different from other WordPress themes. This Astra theme tutorial has turned out to be one of my favorite themes.
Astra theme is one of the best WordPress themes. This is because not only does it allow importing professional & branded website designs but it also has a free and great plugins repository.
The support system of this theme is also very good because during the research I found that the team of Astra is standing 24/7 in the service of their customers.
A complete arrangement of videos and articles has been made in it so that bloggers can understand the theme deeply.
The schema markup, LearnDash, and AMP used in it further enhance the beauty of this theme. With this, I hope that this Astra Theme Review 2021 will prove to be helpful for you.
FAQ: Astra Theme Review 2022
Let us now end this Astra theme review and look at some important questions and answers related to it:
Q1. Is Astra Theme SEO-Friendly?
Ans. Yes, the Astra theme is specially designed for SEO.
Q2. Does Astra’s theme support white labeling?
Ans. Yes, of course, Astra Pro has the facility of white labeling for custom branding.
Q3. Who are the Competitors of Astra Theme?
Ans. The names of the Competitors of Astra are as follows:
- GeneratePress
- OceanWP
- Neve
- Blocksy
- Genesis
- Avada
- Sydney Pro