4 Best Astra Theme Alternatives (Free & Premium)

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WP Astra theme is the most downloaded and popular non-default WordPress theme ever, at least as of writing. 

The default Astra theme is primarily sufficient for most personal blog designs. You can tweak every part of the theme to make your website design imagination live. 

And if the default theme is unsuitable for your design, 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 just the suitable WordPress theme for you. 

If you’re looking for the best Astra theme alternatives, you will find several top candidates in today’s post. 

Astra 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, bring your content to the front and center of the user’s view, and help with website branding.  

When you pick the right theme for your website, you can display important messages in prominent places on the blog, customize elements to your desire, 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, saving costs and eliminating 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.

Also, compatibility with other plugins is 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; this means your audience uses smartphones mostly to visit 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), providing lightning-fast mobile websites for users. 

Customization Option

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

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

Consider a theme that allows adding widgets to several parts of your web pages to enhance website design, user experience, and functionality. 

Speed and Performance

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

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 the lightweight ones with built-in performance mechanisms, support cache function, 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 great 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.

4 Alternatives WordPress Themes to Astra

Only a few themes can compete with the Astra theme in terms of performance, security, SEO, 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 themes 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 going premium.

1. WP Kadence

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

Like the Astra theme, Kadence is lightweight and fast-loading, has excellent developer support, and has powerful customization options. 

The free version of Kadence is incredibly powerful and sufficient for most personal blog designs. You can design unique and stunning web pages with the free version.  

The Kadence theme customizer settings are similar to Astra’s, making it easy to design your website sections like header, footer, logo, layouts, and site appearance. 

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 content on the page. 

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

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

WP Kadence Theme Top Features

• Integrate with WordPress page builders, such as Beaver Builder, Elementor, Gutenberg, etc.
• Compatible with eCommerce and eLearning software like Woocommerce, LearnDash, LifterLMS, 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
• Drag-and-drop header and footer builder.
• Support for custom post types.
• Built-in breadcrumb engine generator.
• Add sticky headers.
• One-click CSS preloading in the header.
• Global settings for typography, color palette, layouts, links, buttons, etc. 
• Design a beautiful, attractive, transparent header.
• Enable one-click Scroll to 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; no element is outside your control. Its WYSIWYG drag-and-drop editor lets you drag, span, resize, rearrange, move, drop, clone, and transform elements to your heart’s desire. 

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. 

Divi Theme Top Features.

• Code your custom CSS along with Divi visual design. 
• Write content from your website’s front end and experience the result in real-time. 
• Use the Undo, Redo, and Revision 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. GeneratePress

GeneratePress is another popular WordPress theme and a very strong 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 delivering lighting speed, accessibility, and stability. 

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

Like most WordPress themes, GeneratePress has starter templates allowing you to deploy website design quickly without building from scratch.

Though it also offers a free version, it is limited and basic. The free version does not offer sufficient customization of features, depriving you of creating a unique and beautiful website design. 

If you want to use GeneratePress, I advise using the premium theme version, which brings more customization 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.

4. Blocksy

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

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

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

Blocksy 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 archives 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 structure data. 
• Create custom widgets with customizable typography.
• GDPR compliant ready. 
• And more.

Conclusion.

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

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

Consider mobile responsiveness, SEO-optimized themes, update frequency, support, compatibility with other WordPress plugins, price, and customization f. 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 amazing, 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 its free version and compare it with other premium features in other themes.