Astra Theme Review: Is it a Good WordPress Theme?

A website theme plays a pivotal role in brand representation and users’ experience. Whether it’s designing or content representation, everything requires a website theme. Without a good website theme it’s not possible to build a professional looking website and attract customers. So in this post we will learn all about Astra & its all features, a popular WordPress theme of all time.

I have written about Astra earlier in a post best WordPress themes but there has been lots of features added since then. Astra started growing faster and has added many important features and updates in recent days. Before going into more details about the new features of Atra, let’s get a quick view on the Company Info and the features Astra offers.

Astra Theme – Company Info

Astra is a WordPress theme formed in the year 2009 by the Brainstorm Force team with the rich experience in web design. Over the years Astra has made the name for them and is considered as one of the most popular WordPress theme in the market today.

Astra Details:

Astra WordPress Theme Features

Below are the highlighted features of Astra Theme:

• Better Website Performance: Vanilla JavaScript that prevents render blocking jQuery, lightweight theme that loads in less than 0.5 seconds, and requires less than 50KB of resources.
• Optimized Code: Uses default WordPress data and best coding standards.
• Powerful Design Options: It comes with layout manager, transparent header, sticky header, mobile header, page header, dedicated sidebar, & mega menu.
• WooCommerce Ready: WooCommerce ready to build and design online store and sell products. Display your products with Grid view, Infinite scroll, quick view, gallery, sales bubble style.
• Typography: Responsive Google Fonts, Text transform for heading tags, Paragraph margin option. You can also use Custom fonts by installing Custom Fonts Plugin.
• Background and Colors: Control color of Primary Header, Above and Below Header, Sticky Header, Sidebar, Footer, Content, Single Page, & Archive Page.
• Blog Archive Layout: Display all your blog post with Grid, List, & Masonary Layout. Attract and engage visitors by displaying highlight first post, stylish pagination, infinite blog post loading.
• Header & Footer: Global design options with Left, Right, & center Logo header, above and below header content, above and below header layout, flexible footer layout design.
• Integration: Inbuilt schema mark-up and SEO optimized. Integrates seamlessly with LifterLMS and LearnDash.
• Widgets: Provides you Address widget, Social icons widgets, and Info list widgets.
• Custom Design: Create custom header, footer, 404 page, Layout hooks, and display conditions.
• Support: To understand and know more about Astra you can watch detailed video tutorials, read In-depth articles, and get help from 24/7 support team.

These are the primary features provided by Astra WordPress theme to build a professional looking website with best user experience. They are packed with features and are making sure they provide every required by a WordPress website owner or designer to stay ahead of the competition. You will also get Astra starter sites readymade templates to build your website in no time.

Installing Astra Theme on WordPress Site

To install Astra theme, you first need a WordPress site. If you don’t have a WordPress site then I would suggest you to follow how to create a WordPress website.

Astra is available free to download from the WordPress official themes directory. So you can start with their free version and later upgrade to the pro or agency package for more advanced functionality. If you are new to WordPress then the free version is ok to start with but, if you are planning to build a business website or ecommerce site then it is better to start with the Astra pro version.

To install Astra on your WordPress site search for the Astra theme and click install. Then click on activate to set Astra as your website’s current theme.

Customizing Astra Theme

Customizing Astra theme is a piece of cake at the moment because they provide controls for each of the section of your website from WordPress theme customization with all basic to advanced settings including Global Settings, Typography, Colors, Containers, Header, Footer, Sidebar, Blog, Menu, Widgets, Homepage Settings, Additional Styling. They also provided some handy guide to find out all necessary information about Astra.

Astra Theme Brand New Features

• Header & Footer Builder: Astra provides you a brand new visual header and footer builder that helps you to design advanced and unique header & footer for your website. It lets you create different layers in header and footer with essential elements like Button, HTML, Social Icon, Search, Menu, etc. All these elements can be used by simply dragging and dropping on different sections of the header and footer. (Astra Header Builder – Sneak Peek – YouTube)
• Visibility Option: You can show or hide options as per devices like Mobile, Desktop, & Tablet.
• Color & Image Control: UI compatible gradient color control and background image control.
• Gutenberg Editor: Gutenberg editor compatible theme that helps you to use and design text, images, code, & other multimedia using the WordPress default Gutenberg block editor.
• Security: The codes and other elements used in the theme are hardened for security.

Other Astra Theme Features

• Page Builders Support: Astra works with almost all popular page builders including Elementor, Beaver Builder, Divi, Site Origin, Visual Composer, and other.
• Accessibility Ready: Astra is accessibility ready and follows WCAG 2.0 standards which means the theme meets the AA level essential for usability.
• Translation & RTL Ready: With .po & .mo files Astra can be translated in any language which helps you to create multilingual websites.
• Schema markup for SEO: It has inbuilt schema markup following Schema.org guidelines. It helps to boost your sites SEO performance.
• Hooks & Filters: Web developers will find it as the best theme to work with for it’s easy to understand and extendable codes.

The main advantage of Astra over other WordPress theme is that it is 100% open source and developed on GitHub so, anyone can contribute to the development.

Conclusion

If you are serious about your website then you must use a good theme. Without the right theme you can’t achieve your sites goals. You need to make brand awareness and provide better user experience with your website theme. So it’s a must have thing to build a successful website. There are so many WordPress themes available in the market today but few of them provide that much flexibility and customization options at an affordable price.

If you plan on using Astra as your WordPress website theme you will get access to all the features mentioned above and don’t need to buy any extra feature for your website. Just install Astra theme on your site, active it, go for pro for more extendibility and support. If any of the feature appeal to you then you can go with Astra as it is the most lightweight, SEO optimized and popular WordPress theme in the market today.