dWor2023 is in full swing, and although we all hope it will be a lot less 2022-ish, we can’t help but express our concern for the challenges that website owners will have to experience during this year. According to a Hubspot study, seven site performance challenges must be addressed if you want to prosper this year. To summarize their extensive analysis, the most significant problems website owners will face are:

• The lack of responsive design
• The design load
• The outdated themes and plugins
• The slow page load time due to unoptimized visuals
• The surge in HTTP requests
• Network latency problems and web hosting issues

Of course, there are some obvious solutions for all of them. The last one is the easiest. Just join HostArmada’s fast, secure and stable hosting services, and you won’t ever have a problem with your hosting. The rest while we can’t offer a service as a solution, we can certainly point you to the best WordPress theme that will definitely help you avoid all these pressing issues. Astra, without a doubt, is up to the task. The renowned WordPress theme has proven that it has all the features one needs for a winning website.

Is Astra really that great?

The short answer here is a resounding Yes! Definitely! Astra is a fast, extremely customizable, and, most importantly, predominantly free WordPress theme that gives you complete control over your website’s visuals. Precisely due to Astra’s effortless customization, the WordPress theme is the second most used in the United States and takes 7.09% of the WordPress theme market. About 0.14% of the top 10,000 websites use Astra, a testimonial of its high quality.

Moreover, over 2.35 million websites worldwide trust Astra as their theme. It also enjoys a 5-star review from thousands of users. However, the biggest recognition for this astounding WordPress theme comes from their high-profile clients. Currently, Astra is used by organizations like NASA, Stanford University, Bob Jones University, Liquid Web, and others.

Why did all of them choose Astra?

The best thing about Astra is that it clicks both with newbies and professional designers. It has a learning curve that allows you to start small with predetermined elements and sections, but the more you learn, the more customizable your website can become.

So, Astra has a vast pre-build website catalog for beginners with no web designer knowledge or interest. This will allow you to start your very own website in under 24 hours with all the elements needed for a successful web portal. If you have some knowledge or decide to allocate some time to learn more about web design, you can enjoy the easy customization process. This will allow you to create a genuinely professional and unique website without any HTML, CSS, or JavaScript.

Furthermore, Astra has a lot to offer to professional web developers. With its clean and extendable code, Astra is one of the easiest WordPress themes to work with.

Astra is 100% open source, as it was developed entirely transparently on GitHub. Most importantly, Astra allows complete design freedom.

All of this would be pointless if Astra weren’t fully SEO optimized. This doesn’t only mean that the entire theme is lightning fast and loads as fast as the hosting provider allows but also that its whole codebase structure complies with all the best SEO practices. It even comes with the Schema.org markup that you need.

We have no doubt you already think that Astra is quite impressive, and we couldn’t agree more. Still, if you are unsure, let’s look deeper into what makes Astra one of the two most preferred WordPress themes in the US.

Largest library of pre-build Websites

If you are a beginner and have just created your first website, you naturally have a lot to learn. Still, you don’t have to wait 2-3 years to learn how to make one unique website, so you can start earning from your business.

For example, if you are a retailer, writer, architect, teacher, or simply a service provider, knowing HTML, CSS and JavaScript is definitely not a must. Moreover, learning those languages requires time and dedication, which you have invested elsewhere to become the professional you are today. You don’t need to create an outstanding, highly complicated web design. All you need is a place on the internet to offer your services and get more business.

Astra’s library of pre-build websites was created just with you in mind. The WordPress theme has the most extensive collection of website templates, and with over 240 completely built and ready-to-use websites, one can hardly find a niche that the Astra developers did not cover.

Moreover, several thousand webpage templates are ready to welcome your leads and convince them to convert. Regardless of your industry and niche, Astra’s library has it. So whether you are a professional handyman, repairing rooftops, or a freelance accountant, there is a template for you.

Make it unique with ease

If you have absolutely no idea or vision of how your website should look, relying on hundreds of pre-built websites is a perfect solution. However, if you are ready to take the next step and make your website unique, on-brand, and distinguishable from all the rest, Astra is prepared to accommodate your needs. With the built-in customization software, you can change almost anything you wish to the front end of your website without any coding.

The Layout settings give you access to various options regarding your website containers, header, footer, blog, single pages, posts, sidebars, and any other aspect of your website. You can choose which elements to hide and which one should be highlighted.

Colors and Typography are a cornerstone of your brand image, so you shouldn’t underestimate their importance. So naturally, Astra allows you to pick your color and typography, so they will correspond precisely to your brand image and vision.

Furthermore, Astra gives you many options regarding your blog posts and archive pages. The most useful of them is the direct control over the metadata. As blog posts are predominantly used as an SEO tool, this feature brings you a long way to reaching the top of Google Search Results.

All of these features are done with one thing in mind: reduce your work on the website and give you the time and energy to focus on more pressing issues, like finding and converting leads. Still, if you are trying to create a genuine masterpiece, even though you are not a professional web developer, Astra can help with that as well. One may even use a lead management software to effectively manage the converted leads.

DIY website that doesn’t need coding

To create one immaculate website, you don’t need to know PHP, HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. All you need is a vision and the Astra WordPress theme. In addition, Astra is compatible with some of the best drag-and-drop builders on the internet, like Elementor. As a result, you can create a unique website front end that aligns entirely with your needs and vision. The best part is that you can see how every element takes its place without needing extra software or constantly hitting the preview button.

The best feature, however, is the header and footer built, which allows you to create a unique header and footer to the envy of your competitors. All you need is to drag and drop the elements you’d like to add, write your copy, place your logo, and your website is halfway finished.

Speed is always in focus.

No matter how beautiful your website is, you will never get the leads and conversions you hope to achieve without a proper loading speed. Moreover, with a slow website, your SEO efforts will suffer greatly. A slow website leads to a higher bounce rate, which in terms deteriorates your website’s quality in the eyes of Google. Naturally, this will hinder your positioning, visibility, and traffic. Ultimately a slow website leads to loss of customers, reduced income, and lost profits.

Naturally, an excellent hosting service is needed, but even if you are using HostArmada as your hosting service provider, we can’t exceed your website’s limitations. In other words, for a hosting service to improve your website speed, your website should be up to the task.

This is why we recommend Astra. The WordPress theme has a genuinely excellent speed optimization. The theme developers made sure every single line of code had been optimized. With its feather-light weight of just 50kb, Astra is about six times lighter than the next best theme. Moreover, it can load in less than half a second with the default WordPress data, and it scored above 90% on various renowned online speed tests like Pingdam, GTmetrix, Yslow, and Google dev.

E-Commerce Ready

Regardless of everything we have said so far, a website is just as good as its capability to generate profit from the very get-go. Well, Astra excels at this. It’s fully compatible with the most prominent e-commerce plugin in the world, WooCommerce. In a matter of minutes, you can start selling your products by simply using a template, adding your products, and going online. Of course, you will need to spend a bit more time customizing your WooCommerce page to be more proficient. Thankfully Astra gives you all the tools to create one truly immaculate sales page where your customers would feel secure and enticed to purchase. The off-canvas sidebar is one feature that helps you eliminate all distractions on the screen without hindering your website’s user experience.

Thanks to this Astra and WooCommerce collaboration, you can have one unique, beautiful, lightning-fast website ready to sell products and bring you profit within a day. What more can you need?

Will Astra be the theme of 2023?

Astra is genuinely a great WordPress theme that can accommodate every business niche and desire. Moreover, its features are designed with users in mind and are not there just for advertisement.

So, will Astra be the theme of 2023? Well, we don’t know. It’s way too early to give them this award. Yet, with what they have shown so far, their competitors would surely have a hard time competing, as Astra is definitely way ahead in the lead.