Astra WordPress Theme Review 2021 — Best WordPress Theme

Astra is one of the most popular and highly recommended themes for WordPress users. It has some amazing features and functionality.

It has been available for a long time in the market and is still continually improving. In this post, we’ll review the Astra WordPress theme based on our experience, reviews, and testimonials.

There are many things you can build with the Astra theme. Portfolio website, a personal blog, informative website, and eCommerce shop. This theme has all the functionality which is required to create any kind of site.

One of the great features of the Astra theme is, it provides free demo sites. You can use these templates and make changes to them according to your need. They have pre-built templates for almost any category and customization to that template is quite easy.

Another thing about Astra is they have two versions available for users. The first is a free version and another is paid. The free version has some design limitations. But, if you purchase their paid version you will get full flexibility to make changes to the site.

In this article, we’ll explain why to choose Astra for your next site. We will start with the free version and see how the paid version is beneficial for you.

So let’s just dive right in!

Astra WordPress Theme Review 2021

Astra Free Version

Let’s Start with Astra free version.

Astra offers many customization features in its free version. They have almost every option that many free version themes don’t offer.

It is one of the trending themes in the lightweight category. The loading time of Astra is very fast according to WordPress users their websites loads in less than a second.

They achieved this thing by disabling the jQuery script in the theme. They also managed to compress their other resources under 50KB.

One great feature of Astra is page builder usage. Astra supports popular page builders like Elementor, Beaver Builder, Brizy, WPBakey page builder, and Gutenberg.

All page builders are mostly used by professional WordPress developers. The best thing is that it supports Gutenberg which is a WordPress default page customizer.

If you plan to use their starter templates then you have to use Elementor, Beaver Builder, Brizy, and Gutenberg. With these page builders only you can import starter templates.

Another great thing about Astra is you can customize the Header and Footer in the free version. Astra added this feature this year 2021.

To activate and use these starter templates you need to install the Starter Templates plugin and activate the Astra theme.

Astra has over 150+ Pre-build designs available. The main thing about it you can fully customize it as you want. You can create almost any kind of website with these starter templates. Website, Blog, Responsive portfolio, Online shop, and much more.

The best thing is in the free version you can use 70 pre-build designs. All these designs will cover all your basic needs.

Astra is beginner-friendly. You don’t need any types of coding knowledge to work with this. But this theme is created to keep developers in mind. If you are a developer and want to add your codes to this theme then you can do it easily.

Let’s dig some customization options…

Astra has many customization options. But when you install the Astra theme then you will not get all options. You need to install some plugins to get those options.

There is a total of 12 plugins that are offered by the theme. The free plugins are available which are created by Brainstorm force.

These all-free plugins make the Astra theme more functional and add many features. But without these plugins, Astra offers much functionality which is listed below.

The list of plugins suggested buy Astra is as follow

1. Ultimate Addons for Gutenberg
2. Custom Fonts
3. Custom Typekit Fonts
4. Sidebar Manager
5. Astra Bulk Edit
6. Astra Customizer Reset
7. Astra Hooks
8. Unlist Post and Pages
9. Customizer Search
10. Homepage Banner for Astra Theme
11. Templator
12. Astra Theme Visual Hook

Customizing Blog Page

Astra offers a new blog page customization option which is available in the latest update. You can customize your blog page and post page as well. You can manage the sequence of the post and re-arrange it as you like.

Customizing Logo And Menu

You can add your custom logo and customize the logo in the theme customizing option. You can also add a transparent header area with the free version of the Astra theme.

To make the logo and menu more responsive or customize it you can use Elementor or Beaver page builder. There are pre-build header templates available in the starter templates section.

Changing Theme Colour And Background

In the customization option, you can change the theme colors. You can add different colors for menu types and links. Also, you can change the theme background.

And if you are using a page builder like Elementor or Beaver builder then you can customize the background separately for each page using those.

Astra offers its own widgets and functionality that are required in each website. This all included in theme files and all are available in the free version.

Address Widget

This widget will allow you to display your business address anywhere on the website without writing any code.

Info List Widget

This info list will help you add any type of good-looking informative list on your page. You can place it on your site’s widget area or anywhere on-site by using the page builder.

Social Icons Widget

Most of the free themes in WordPress need to add separate social sharing buttons. But Astra gives you free social sharing buttons feature in its free version. Simply you need to select the social network you want to display front side.

Custom Header And Footer

Astra has its own header and footer customization option and they offer some pre-build designs also. You can use pre-designed templates or make your own with help of a page builder.

Dedicated Sidebar

You can customize the sidebar as you like and add the different widgets to it. This sidebar is mobile responsive so you don’t need to customize it for the mobile version.

Schema Integration

Schema integration helps search engines to understand your website. This is a very helpful feature for ON-Page SEO work.

SEO Optimized

Astra comes with schema integration and it is lightweight this feature makes Astra SEO friendly theme. You can also add SEO plugins like Yoast or Rank Math to improve your SEO visibility.

eCommerce Integration

Astra theme comes with woo commerce compatibility. Which means you can sell any products or service without any problem. There are many Pre-build eCommerce templates available in the started templates section. All Pre-build templates are responsive.

There are many woo commerce options are ready to use in this theme. You can use any additional e-commerce plugins. The additional plugins will not affect the theme’s performance. You will get the same speed.

We saw all things about Astra’s free version. Now we will see what Astra offers in their paid version.

Check Astra WordPress Theme Full Review here….