When searching for premium themes, you may come across many options, and that creates more confusion in choosing the best one. You are not alone, and that’s why I’m going to recommend a trusted WP theme.
Meet 👋 – Astra
Why?
A lightweight theme is a necessary first step when you want to build a blazing fast website with WordPress. Astra combines lightning speed with a set of features especially crafted for designers and developers. Astra lightweight theme not only offers high page loading speed — it also offers high site creation speed, thanks to the possibility of choosing pre-made sites from a big library that solves the common fear of the blank page. Pro plan users get access to the full list of starter, pixel-perfect, ready-to-use templates. However, even free users can still dip into a considerable number of available samples. It is built for performance — that’s why it needs less than 50 KB of resources, while ordinary WordPress themes typically require 300 KB. Such a low weight translates into a mere 0.5 seconds of page loading time. Independent metrics account for it:
Pingdom: 100% speed grade. Google Dev: 95% speed grade. GTmetrix: 400ms load time. YSlow: 95% speed grade.
Once you have your site built, you can start fine-tuning it visually through the range of options the WordPress Customizer offers. There’s absolutely no need to code to control exactly how your site will look. You can change page and post attributes individually, such as content width, number of sidebars, use of transparent headers, and enable/disable title, header, footer, and featured image. There are more than 50 features, which makes Astra truly amazing. Integration with tools such as WooCommerce, Elementor, Beaver Builder, Yoast, LearnDash, and Toolset extends Astra’s usefulness beyond what a theme normally offers. Free users get most of the theme’s functionality at no cost, while paid users get access to a bigger selection of starter templates, besides one-to-one support, extensive training, and other premium plugins. Astra is open-source, and anyone can join the development on GitHub and contribute to its growth. Its creators — a company called Brainstorm Force has the goal to help the WordPress community in building awesome and effective websites.
Used by Millions
More than 1 million active installed shows the credibility of the theme. BuiltWith usage statistics show that the theme has become increasingly popular in recent months and used in the top 10k, 100k, and 1 million sites. Many WordPress professionals recommend Astra for its speed and simplicity. To name a few:
Chris Lema, Liquid Webs Adam Preiser, WPCrafter Ben Pines, Elementor Dough Smith, Fresh Souce Media Vinod David, InfiteWP
Astra has a 5-star rating. Most of them highlight their speed, reliability, and features. Choosing Astra won’t be the wrong choice.
How about a very good alternative?
I get it. Not everyone can please everyone. Whatever the reason is, the good news is there is a very good alternative.
Say Hello 🤝 – GeneratePress
Just like Astra, GeneratePress is a very popular lightweight WordPress theme, also with a 5-star average rating and a well-stocked library of demo sites, either for WordPress standard editor, for Elementor or for Beaver Builder. It uses less than 30 KB of resources.
