Astra Theme Review: No More Dull And Boring Looking WordPress Sites
- August 25, 2020
- 10:57 am
- No Comments
Astra Theme Review
Ease Of use
Value For Money
Customer Support
Functionality
Summary
4.8
Rating
Pros
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Many free demo sites.
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Fastest Themes that I have tested.
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Astra Theme Provides options for custom layouts and Page Headers.
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It has a Mega Menu feature.
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Astra Theme comes with LearnDash Support.
Cons
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The Archive page and blog post styling are very basic.
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The support response time can be on the slower side.
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You will only find three header style options in Astra Theme.
Table of Contents
What Is Astra Theme
The Astra theme is a WordPress theme developed by Brainstorm Force, which is a very famous company in the WordPress developing sector that is operating for over ten years with a team of 60 highly experienced and trained employees.
Why Astra Theme
> It is Flexible
The Astra gives you the flexibility to use this for any type of website you can think about starting from a blogging site to your business eCommerce sites or even travel or beauty blog; you can use it for literally any websites.
> Small Size
Astra will only take about 50KB of space; for some of you, this space doesn’t matter. But this small size means that you can load the site very fast and you don’t have to wait for very long while using Astra.
> Can work with other page builders like drag-and-drop page builders
Astra can easily integrate itself with drag-and-drop page builders like Elementor, Beaver Builder, Thrive Architect, and these site builders are top-rated for creating WordPress sites.
> Super Easy to Customize
While using Astra, you can easily customize your theme; this is possible due to their real-time WordPress customizer. This will enable you to view and adjust things on a real-time preview, and you don’t even need to have any idea about coding.
> Comes with many pre-built demo sites
There is a high possibility that you might not be a professional designer, and hence you can’t build a website from scratch. Don’t worry, Astra got you covered; it offers a massive collection of importable proxy sites for many different niches.
Core Features of Astra Theme
1. Availability of many different demo sites
The options you have are:
- Brizy
- Elementor
- Beaver Builder
- The Main WordPress block editor (Gutenberg)
- eCommerce
- Travel blogs
- Personal blogs
- E-learning
- Real Estate
- Doctors
You can easily check a preview of any site by clicking on it and then just press the Import Site button, and you can leave the rest on Astra.
2. Astra Theme is small in size.
I decided to run a test to make you understand how the size affects the loading time of the site.
The result for v2.0:
The result for v1.8.7:
I couldn’t meet the 0.5s (500ms) load time with the default establishment. However, that is reasonable since we’re utilizing a modest shared facilitating administration to test this. At last, this is a great exhibition and stacking time.
While one would expect that the expanded page size will not affect at all since it’s exceptionally little or maybe even have a bit negative effect (perhaps an extra 1-5ms burden time), the inverse is valid. It stacked quicker, and this difference was not that small, We’re discussing several milliseconds here.
The new form 2.0 is unquestionably an improvement with regards to execution.
The page size is considerably littler than what they promoted.
Be that as it may, allows running a test from Germany, rather than from Washington DC. This copies an individual getting to your site from your nation or getting to the site through a CDN.
In summary, we can easily say that you can load a fully loaded site for less than 200ms.
3. Work without code
If you would prefer not to utilize page manufacturers and simply need the default subject itself, its incredible customizer highlights let you tweak the hues, typography, format, and numerous different settings of pretty much every component of your site, particularly in the genius rendition.
Since v2.0, the customizer got a significant update. It presently performs better than anyone might have expected, stacking blazingly quicker. Notwithstanding that, its choices have been redesigned for better openness. You can customize this newer version more easily in few simple steps, unlike older versions, and you can do this customization a lot quicker and finally making it easier to import the complete site.
4. Astra can work with a WordPress page builder
- Change the width
- Pick the number of sidebars
- Debilitate explicit things, similar to the header, title, included picture, and so forth.
This might be easier for you to understand with a simple example like off chance that your site typically has a sidebar, however you need to make a full-width deals page with your page manufacturer; you could simply debilitate the sidebar and change the width for only that page.
5. Huge collection of design and layout options
There is a tab known as a global tab where you can find all the comprehensive designs for the WordPress theme. However, the older versions didn’t have these options; hence you would have to switch in different screens and change simpler things.
For instance, designing “Global” settings for colors, typography, and so forth in v1.8.7 expects you to get to the accompanying –
- Colors and Background > Base Colors
- Typography > Base Typography
- Design > Container
- Typography
- Colors
- Compartment
- Catches
- Look To Top
Remember that page manufacturer setting will likewise abrogate these defaults.
In this Astra Theme review, I will be discussing a few of these essential global options.
Typography
The global typography settings control the default typography that you need to use on your whole site. Inside this, you’ll discover two settings: Base Typography and Headings.
The base typography settings spread alternatives for the substance and body.
This gives you choices to change the textual style family, variation, text dimension, textual style weight, and so forth. There’s likewise a conscious choice that permits you to change the text dimension contingent upon your client’s gadget. You can get to this by tapping the gadget symbol beside the size mark.
Color
Alongside the typography settings, we have worldwide shading settings. Getting to this will give both of you segments: Base Colors and Content.
The Base Colors contains settings for your topic’s default content shading, subject shading, connect shading, float shading, and so on.
This is likewise where you can change your site’s experience shading or include a background picture. Including a background, the image opens extra background settings.
Extra Background picture settings incorporate reiteration settings, arrangement settings, foundation size, and foundation connection.
Container
This is the place where container and layout related settings can be found. There are settings for the default site design, site width, dividing, WooCommerce format, and so forth.
We should have a brief glance at all the accessible holder settings:
Site format – you can set either full width, max-width, cushioned, and liquid. This will be applied to the external wrapper of your site.
The Width – your site’s substance width.
Space Outside body – this is just accessible while choosing a specific site format. For instance, in the picture above, we have set the site format to cushioned, so we have this alternative. This setting will let you change the space outside your site’s cushioned substance. It accompanies conscious choices available through the gadget symbol.
Format, Page Layout, Blog Post Layout, Archives Layout, WooCommerce -control design settings for different pages.
Dividing – comes into two areas: outside holder and inside the container. And it also works to the “Space Outside Body” setting.
Astra Pro or Free
Who doesn’t like some free stuff? At least I do. But every time free thing doesn’t work or isn’t sufficient for your work hence you have to pay for the pro version. So, in this section of the Astra Theme review, I will be discussing which version will be suitable for you.
The main Astra theme is easily available for free on many websites, but the Astra pro version is paid, and it will add many additional features. So, do you need a pro version to build your site? I have used the free version to create many sites, but again if you wish to make an advance site, not just a regular WordPress page builder, then you should consider going for the pro version.
Let us see some of the impeccable features the pro version has in offer for us.
Customizable Headers
The free form of Astra does, in any case, let you tweak your header, yet Astra Pro gives you significantly further developed choices for altering your header in many different unique ways. You’ll get highlights like:
- Mega Menu- you can create a mega menu that will give you access to easier navigation.
- Sticky Headers- this will make your menu stick even when the user will be scrolling down.
- Mobile Headers- this is by far the best feature because it creates an excellent and custom mobile experience.
More collection of demo sites
If you buy the Astra Pro Agency bundle, you’ll open every importable demo site. In the new pro version, you will gain access to the different types of professional editing modules, including supportive devices like Schema Pro to include rich pieces, WP Portfolio to assist you with including a portfolio, in addition to significantly more.
Better and detailed plugin integrations
You’ll get huge amounts of choices for WooCommerce, similar to a change neighborly two-advance checkout, Ajax truck, and the sky is the limit from there.
Past that, Astra Pro additionally offers devoted mixes for LearnDash and LifterLMS, which is magnificent in case you intend to dispatch your online course with WordPress.
Better styling and layout options
Well, you can say that the free version of Astra already allows you to Customize basic color and typography. Still, the Astra Pro version is much more effective since you can edit and customize every single element on your site.
Astra Pro additionally gives you significantly more design alternatives for your substance and blog. For instance, you can look over different blog file formats and add content above or underneath your header.
Whether or not you go for the paid pro version of the Astra Theme always will depend on you because it depends on the type of work and customization you are expecting to do with Astra.
Astra Pro and the basic free version has the nearly same feature to offer, but Astra pro gives you more options for each of that feature.
Now you might be confused whether to go for the free version or the pro version. In simple words, if the free version is letting you do all your tasks easily and you are happy with it, you don’t need to buy the pro version.
For example, that you end up hitting a few dividers – like you truly need a clingy header, or you need an alternate blog file design – at that point, that is a quite decent marker, then you need Astra Pro.
My Final Verdict on Astra Theme
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Yousuf Hossain
I am an entrepreneur who always invests time closely with people to successfully bring their business online. My main mission with this blog is to help people with offering them free guides and tutorials related to website design and marketing so that people can grow their online businesses following my guidance and path!
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