5 Best Astra Theme Alternatives (Free & Premium)

WP Astra is the most popular WordPress theme ever, at least as of writing. 

The free Astra WordPress theme is primarily sufficient for most personal blog designs. You can customize every part of the theme to design your website.

And if the default theme is unsuitable for your design options, Astra has over 240+ premade starter templates with various design concepts for most industries. 

Still, there could be situations where the Astra theme is not the right WordPress theme for you. 

If you’re looking for the best Astra theme alternatives, today’s post includes several top WordPress multipurpose themes. 

Astra’s WordPress theme is known for being fast-loading, lightweight, and compatible with most WordPress plugins, so any alternative theme to Astra shouldn’t fall behind in any of these aspects. 

Importance of Choosing The Perfect WordPress Theme

Your WordPress theme is an integral component of your online business. 

A good theme will improve your website’s SEO, help users navigate your site better, display your content front and center, and improve website branding.  

Choosing a free WordPress theme can be highly cost-effective and accessible, offering customizable and responsive options that cater to various website needs.

When you pick the right theme, you can display important messages in prominent places on the blog, customize elements, and build unique, stunning designs that wow your audience entirely.  

You can build a unique online presence that stands out from the competitors without being a developer. 

Additionally, high-quality WordPress themes are mobile responsive, cost savings, and eliminate the need to build a separate mobile website.  

How to Choose the Best Astra Theme Alternatives

Choosing the best alternative WordPress themes to Astra can be challenging because it’s hard to find fault in the Astra theme. 

Astra is mobile responsive, fast-loading, SEO optimized, lightweight, and eCommerce ready, and it allows you to build incredible web pages quickly. 

Nonetheless, here are some features to look for when searching for WordPress themes that are better than WP Astra themes. 

SEO Optimized

As mentioned above, choosing themes impacts your website’s search engine visibility. 

You must choose a theme with clean codes, implement semantic HTML 5 markup, and use the proper H tags hierarchy and best practices for better content organization.

Compatibility with other plugins is also essential; choose a theme that helps you improve SEO and is compatible with other WordPress products. 

Mobile Responsive

Approximately 60% of all internet traffic comes from mobile, which means your audience mainly uses smartphones to access your website.

Also, because Google’s search algorithm is mobile-first indexing, having a mobile-optimized website is no longer an option but a necessity. 

Choose a theme that adapts seamlessly to users’ devices, irrespective of screen size, resolution, or technology; your web pages should provide optimal user experience across mobile, tablet, and desktop computers. 

Additionally, ensure the theme provides native support for AMP (accelerated mobile pages), which provides lightning-fast mobile websites. If you’re unsure about theme responsiveness, check the theme’s demo site for a preview.

Customization Option

Choose a versatile WordPress theme that gives you control, flexibility, and extensive customization options to effortlessly create a unique website design.

Look for themes that provide various page layouts for creating unique and functional websites.

Research themes that offer different customizable site layout options and give you control over elements such as color, fonts, columns, rows, dividers, spacing, margins, padding, borders, typography, buttons, links, etc.

Consider a theme that allows you to add widgets to several parts of your web pages, including full site editing features, to enhance your website’s design, user experience, and functionality.

You should also consider a theme fully compatible with the WordPress block editor, making using your WordPress website’s most popular page builders easier.

Another factor to consider is plugin compatibility. Some themes may be incompatible with certain plugins, preventing complete functionality and customization. Check the theme documentation before purchasing to ensure your choice of plugin is not restricted.

Speed and Performance

There is no compromising on speed and performance if you want to improve conversion and generate more revenue.

Choosing a lightweight WordPress theme can offer rapid performance and easy customization for building websites.

Your website theme’s speed and performance can affect user experience, bounce rate, and engagement.

Several WordPress themes, such as Astra, provide built-in performance features like loading Google Fonts locally, preloading local fonts, and optimizing for excellent performance.

So, when choosing a theme, consider lightweight ones that have built-in performance mechanisms, support cache functions, CDN, and other optimization techniques. 

Support

Developer support is critical in choosing the best WordPress themes for your project.

Always consider the quality of support services your theme developer provides when choosing. 

You don’t want to be left alone in emergencies or when you need to figure something out about the theme. 

Choose a theme with excellent community support that is regularly updated and has helpful documentation, blogs, tutorials, etc. 

The support rep should be on the ground 24/7/365, responding to users’ queries and providing helpful support in resolving issues.

Understanding the Astra Theme

Before exploring alternative themes, it’s essential to understand Astra’s features and functionalities. 

Astra is a multipurpose WordPress theme that has gained popularity due to its lightweight design, fast loading speed, and extensive customization options. 

It is designed to work seamlessly with popular page builders like Elementor, Spectra, Beaver Builder, and Gutenberg WordPress Block Editor, making it a versatile choice for various WordPress website projects.

Astra offers a range of pre-built templates and demo sites, allowing users to set up their websites without extensive design skills quickly.

Its robust customization options and seamless integration with the WordPress customizer enable users to adjust colors, fonts, page layouts, and more to create a unique and personalized website. 

Astra is also compatible with various popular third-party plugins, including WooCommerce plugins for eCommerce functionality, WPML for multilingual sites, and various SEO plugins to enhance search engine visibility.

Despite its many advantages, some users may find that Astra does not fully meet their needs, whether due to specific design preferences, performance requirements, or compatibility issues with specific plugins. 

Understanding Astra’s strengths and limitations can help you make an informed decision when considering alternative themes that might better suit your website’s needs.

5 Alternatives WordPress Themes to Astra

Only a few themes can compete with the Astra theme in terms of performance, security, SEO friendliness, support, and speed. 

So, this list won’t be long, as I have weeded out many unqualified themes and only focused on the ones that give Astra intense competition.

With that clear, consider picking one of these best Astra theme alternatives and see what you can make out of the themes.

Start with their free version, design with it, ask your website users for feedback, and analyze your in-house data to inform your best decision on buying the premium version.

1. WP Kadence

WP Kadence tops the list of my best alternative WordPress themes to Astra.

Like the Astra WordPress theme, Kadence is lightweight and fast-loading, has excellent developer support, and offers powerful customization options. Due to its performance and user-friendly customization, WP Kadence is considered a modern WordPress theme.

The free Kadence theme is incredibly powerful and sufficient for most blog and online store designs. It allows you to design unique and stunning web pages.

Kadence has a free WordPress theme with customizer settings similar to Astra’s, making it easy to design your website sections like header, footer, logo, layouts, and site appearance.

Using the Kadence Block with the theme adds additional features and extends the WordPress Gutenberg block editor’s capabilities. From its extensive design library, you can build beautiful pages, professional websites, sections, cards, rows, columns, etc.

Kadence’s theme is built with accessibility in mind, following accessibility best practices and industry standards. The theme provides the required markup, making it easy for screen readers to interpret the content on the page.

Features like keyboard navigation, arial labels, focus control, and WCAG 2.0 standards ensure an optimal experience for visually impaired online users.

If you already use the Astra premium version but are looking for something similar in terms of performance and customization features, switching to the WP Kadence theme makes more sense.

However, for custom design layouts with premium features to build professional websites, you must get the Kadence Pro theme. Also, a paid license gives you access to premium support and technical assistance.

WP Kadence Theme Top Features

• Integrate with WordPress popular page builders, such as Beaver Builder, Elementor, Gutenberg, etc.
• Compatible with eCommerce and eLearning software like Woocommerce, LearnDash, LifterLMS, Sensei LMS, Tutor LMS, Event Calendar, BBPress, etc. 
• Ready-to-use Kadence starter templates.
• Add Kadence blocks to create a beautiful web design.
• Design with custom layouts
• Works with the WordPress customizer.
• Drag-and-drop header and footer builder.
• Support for custom post types.
• Built-in breadcrumb engine generator.
• Add sticky headers.
• Built-in critical CSS preloading performance features.
• Global settings for typography, color palette, layouts, links, buttons, etc. 
• Design a beautiful, attractive, transparent header.
• Enable one-click Scroll to the top.
• And more.

2. Divi

If Astra theme limits your design creativity, Divi theme + the page builder plugin take you to another level you never imagined. 

You can visually build any design you can think of with the Divi theme builder. It is a powerful and versatile WordPress theme and page builder for creators, professionals, and web design agencies. 

However, if you want to create a unique design for a personal project or a simple blog, Divi might not be for you. 

Unlike Astra themes that get you up and running in minutes without being techy, Divi requires you to go through a learning phase to get familiar with its drag-and-drop editor, especially if it’s your first time using Divi and you’re not a skilled web designer. 

Divi puts you in total control of design. It’s WYSIWYG drag-and-drop builder lets you drag, span, resize, rearrange, move, drop, clone, and transform elements to your liking. 

Talking about Divi features is beyond the scope of this article; still, watch the video below to get a glimpse of what you can achieve using the Divi theme. 

The only drawback of Divi is that it is a premium version-only theme. There is no free access, and the only theme on this list is unavailable on the WordPress repository. However, there is a 30-day money-back guarantee policy, just in case you don’t like it.

Divi Theme Top Features.

• Code your custom CSS using the Divi visual page builder. 
• Write content from your website’s front end and experience the result in real time. 
• Use the Undo, Redo, and Revision functions to go back in time and correct design mistakes.
• Create and save custom designs to reuse later.
• Design responsive web pages that adapt seamlessly to mobile, tablet, and laptop devices. 
• Create eye-catching designs from over 200 website elements. 
• Choose from 2,000+ pre-built website layouts. 
• Hundreds of animations and effects for customization. 
• Create stacking content and sticky headers with Divi’s stick feature. 
• Create a subtle and elegant scrolling effect with Parallax.

3. Responsive Theme 

The Responsive Theme developed by Cyberchimps is a simple yet feature-rich, versatile, free WordPress theme. It is fast and lightweight, boasting a high GTMetrix score of 100%, ensuring quick loading times.

The theme offers 250+ ready-to-use WordPress website templates with a single click import. It has over 500 five-star ratings and extensive customization options, which allow you to edit/modify every aspect of your website.

It integrates seamlessly with its sister plugin, Responsive Addons for Elementor, which provides over 80 highly functional widgets to design custom layouts and add versatile functionalities to your website.

The addition of its theme builder plugin allows you to customize and design every part of your website.

It is a lightweight theme designed to encourage high performance. Even with various features, pages are designed to weigh less than 100 KB and load in less than 2 seconds.

Additionally, it adheres to the most recent coding standards and maintains a well-defined data structure.

As the name suggests, Cyberchimp’s Responsive WordPress theme is highly responsive, ensuring it looks great across all devices.

It is fully compatible and works seamlessly with all popular WordPress plugins, including Mailchimp, WooCommerce integration, Elementor page builder, Yoast, WPForms, and Contact Form 7.

Built with high-quality semantic practices that promote search engine optimization. It works perfectly with all major SEO plugins.

The theme also includes schema microdata and SEO-enhancing features such as breadcrumbs, which assist SEO crawlers in better comprehending your website.

Responsive Theme Pricing

Cyberchimps’ theme is free, but to unlock additional features and functionality to your website, you can consider upgrading to the paid version, which costs $29.50 yearly. 

Support

You can request support via various means, including:

• Email support
• Extensive knowledge base articles and product documentation.
• Video tutorials.

4. GeneratePress

GeneratePress is a popular WordPress theme known for its performance and customization options. It is a top alternative to Astra. 

It is lightweight, classic, and optimized to deliver fast-loading website pages and responsive design across devices and web browsers. Its main focus is on providing lightning speed, accessibility, and stability. 

GeneratePress has many advanced customization features to make your WordPress site design stand out. 

Like most WordPress themes, GeneratePress has pre-made templates that allow you to quickly deploy beautiful WordPress website designs without building from scratch.

Though it also offers free access to the theme, it is limited and basic. GeneratePress’s free theme provides insufficient feature customization, depriving you of creating a unique and beautiful website design. 

If you want to use GeneratePress, I advise using the premium theme version.

GeneratePress theme premium adds more customization features not possible with the free plan. You have pro features like masonry archive blog layouts, infinite Scroll, off-Canvas panel, mobile header, WooCommerce integration, etc.

GeneratePress Theme Top Features

• Advanced site layout system.
• Create a sticky navigation menu for a better user experience.
• Control styling options like color, background, spacing, typography, etc.
• Create high-converting WooCommerce pages with GeneratePress. 
• Add content and code anywhere on the page with hooks.
• Create stunning website design with dynamic block elements.
• Save hours on website design with GeneratePress starter templates.

5. Blocksy

Blocksy is Gutenberg-ready, allowing you to build stunning website designs with the WordPress block editor.

The Blocksy theme integrates seamlessly with the WordPress theme customizer, making it easy to fine-tune every part of your website effortlessly. 

Developed with clean codes and compatible with the most popular WordPress page builders plugins, such as Elementor, Beaver Builder, Brizy, and Gutenberg. 

Blocksy’s hyperintuitive customization gives you control over every part of your website, including the header, footer, top bar, typography, sidebars, paginations, etc.…and previewing the changes in real-time. 

Blocksy Theme Top Features

• Powerful header styling options with several customizable design elements.
• Advanced and modern blog archive layout options.
• Compatible with Gutenberg blocks and styling.
• WooCommerce compatibility and other WordPress eCommerce plugins. 
• Built-in image lazy loading features
• Instant live search box
• Live customizer
• Blocksy is mobile responsive and retina-ready. 
• Integrated schema markup with Google structured data. 
• Create custom widgets with customizable typography.
• GDPR compliance ready. 
• And more.

Why Choose an Alternative to Astra?

While Astra is a popular and feature-rich theme, some users may find it does not meet their specific needs or preferences. Some reasons for choosing an alternative to Astra include:

• Limited Customization Options – Despite its extensive customization features, some users may find that Astra doesn’t offer the specific design flexibility they need for their website.
• Performance Issues – Although Astra is known for its fast loading speed, certain websites with heavy content or specific functionalities might experience performance issues.
• Lack of Support – Users who require extensive support might find Astra’s support services lacking or not responsive enough to their needs.
• Different Design Preferences – Personal taste plays a significant role in theme selection. Some users might prefer the design aesthetics of other themes over Astra.
• Limited Compatibility with Certain Plugins or Page Builders – While Astra is compatible with many popular plugins and page builders, specific tools or features might work better with other themes.

Exploring alternatives to Astra can help you find a theme that better aligns with your specific requirements, ensuring your website looks great and performs optimally.

Conclusion.

Picking the best Astra theme alternatives can be tricky, especially when comparing design functionalities with performance and security. 

To make the best decision, you must test thoroughly, explore different options, know what you want, and analyze performance and speed. 

Consider mobile responsiveness, SEO-friendly themes, update frequency, support, compatibility with other WordPress plugins, price, and customization. These factors will help you make the right call. 

If you seek my opinion, I’d advise you to try Kadence. Kadence is the best theme I have tried, and it is closer to or better than the Astra theme. 

The free version is fantastic, fully customizable, mobile responsive, lightweight, and delivers fast-loading pages. 

Kadence offers many free features that are only available in other competitors’ premium themes. So, you might want to check out its free version and compare it with other premium features in different themes.