Ecommerce and more
One of the strengths of Astra WordPress is the native integration with Woocommerce : you mount the theme and the most famous plugin on the web to create an ecommerce with WP is already ready. Then you decide whether to use it or not but the important thing is to be able to count on the maximum availability of this theme.
astra theme customization checkout woocommerce
A theme that even has integration with Schema.org to activate rich snippets, essential for an ecommerce. And it allows you to activate a checkout system without distractions to reduce the abandonment rate related to overly complex steps. All fantastic, right? But this theme can also become something other than the classic online shop for physical products to be sent by courier.
On Astra you activate an online course sales platform thanks to the integration with the specific plugins LearnDash and LifterLMS . What is it for? You can create video training and sell subscriptions or participations to focus on infoproducts, one of the most interesting passive incomes on the web market.
Astra Performance for WordPress
One of the strong points of this WordPress theme: performance . The developers of this theme have paid great attention to everything that allows you to obtain a good starting point for websites and e-commerce that want to obtain the best possible UX for their web pages.
What are the reasons that lead us to focus on Astra performance? First of all Astra uses Vanilla JavaScript that prevents jQuery from blocking rendering: a point that can affect performance. Performance that is implemented thanks to the fact that fonts are stored in such a way as to avoid unnecessary waste of time. The explanation in the official post :
“ Once you have your local font files enabled, you can also preload these. By default, a browser will wait to load the font file until it starts “painting” visible content on the user's screen (…). Preloading fonts will “tell” the browser to import the font early on, so the font is ready to be displayed as soon as the browser starts painting the text, which will result in the positive impact on your website performance”.
The concept is clear: once you have enabled local fonts, you Poland Phone Numbers
can load them in advance . This preloading tells the user's client that loads your Astra-themed web page to import the font without any particular loss of time. All to the advantage of the speed perceived by the user (which is what is needed).
This is because it is ready to be displayed as soon as the browser starts to render (paint) the text . This, combined with a carefully optimized code, allows for a fast WordPress website. Especially if you combine it with a decisive plugin to increase performance: WP Rocket .
Astra: Free or Paid?
To close this review dedicated to Astra, one of the best WordPress themes to summarize web design and performance, it is right to make a reflection : do we focus on the free version or do we invest the right amount and download the paid one? The solution is on the official Free vs Pro page .
wp astra free vs pro
As you can see, there is a huge difference between the two versions but I can confirm, from experience, that you can get extraordinary results even with the free version! ?
But if you want to customize menus and footers – and take advantage of the features of this fast, UX friendly and SEO optimized WordPress theme – you have to focus on the paid version. Which can be annual or lifetime , for single websites or for those who need agency resources. In your opinion, is Astra right for you?