Why we love Astra Theme – and think you should too!

So you have decided you are ready for a website to showcase your business and all that it has to offer, but where to start?

WordPress is the most used platform which is easy enough, but if you have a certain niche business and you want your website to reflect that, you will want to look into what theme would work best for your particular brand. What templates offer the best look and functionality overall.

Now although there are many around, we will be talking about Astra in this article – as is everyone else.

Come one, let’s find out what makes Astra so special ….

WHAT IS ASTRA

Astra is one of the most popular free themes available on the WordPress.org theme directory. Developed by Brainstorm force, it is an extremely popular theme and is on the lips of many – and we will share with you some reasons why think this is the case shortly.

But for now it is also important to know why you should be careful when choosing a theme for your website. You may or may not have already found out how making the wrong choice can be detrimental to the reach and outcome you may have in mind for your business. When you are choosing a theme you need to look at functionality, ease of movement through the website and how user-friendly it is.

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF ASTRA (Free Version)

Here are some benefits of using the Astra theme.

1. It is lightning fast – Speed when loading a website page is extremely important because no one wants to sit around for 5 minutes waiting to see what you have to offer.  The developers give an estimated loading speed of under half a second – wow! That is Flash fast! The reason for this is a number of changes that have been made, disabling jQuery, keeping resources under 50kb and much more.

• A unique selling point – Astra integrates beautifully with all page builders on WordPress including WPBakery page builder, Elementor, Divi Builder and Gutenberg. This makes this theme highly desirable especially if you have a few websites running at the same time.

• Make it your own – Astra is very versatile and customizable, so you can put your unique fingerprint on your website quickly and easily. You can also download many features that work and integrate seamlessly with Astra which enhances the customization feature even further.

• Astra can be used with most plugins with ease – again something that is very favorable because it makes it super versatile and the ability to do almost anything with the theme is immense.

• It’s FREE – Okay well there is a free version, which is basically all you need, but you can also look into the PRO version for a small fee which unlocks even more incredible features.

Astra is also great for the fact that it allows you to create something stylish, functional and professional looking but that is not too OTT and complicated.

BENEFITS OF ASTRA PRO

You have access to an even wider array of web designs and various features referred to as MODULES.

Some of the modules you will come across are:

1. Colors and background Module – Allowing you to change the color of basically any part of your design
2. Typography Module – This one allows you the chance to style and customize your fonts
3. Spacing Module – More options for borders and margins
4. Site layout Module – It enhancers the custom layout as it gives you more control over width and container.
5. Custom Layout Module – Layouts can be saved and easily integrated into other areas of your website
6. Starter Templates – Astra has some great starter templates if you are looking for inspiration, that can be deployed at the click of a button.

Amongst those main ones are also features like customizing headers for mobile devices as well as allowing you to have spaces for banners and so forth on your website. There is also a page header module that allows you to create more advanced headers.

The Nav Menu is one of the coolest modules as it allows you to transform a drab and boring menu into a SUPER menu.  

FINAL WORDS

I think you will agree that Astra as a theme is incredible. It really has it all and it is FREE. However I am sure that if you are someone running a live website you will want to upgrade to a PRO package at some point in time – purely so you can create an even more fantastic website.

Astra is certainly the theme for 2020 and we believe that more and more users will be adopting Astra for their websites as the year goes on.

If you are at all in doubt, you need only read the rave reviews available. If you perhaps need more guidance on using Astra and themes, in general, you can have a consultation with one of our specialists here at Creative Ground.