Astra vs OceanWP – Which WordPress Theme will be better in 2023?

Disclaimer: Lasha Chankseliani has written a guest post.

There are many popular WordPress themes available for free or at a premium price. These make creating a site very intuitive and easy.

Astra and OceanWP are two of the oldest and most popular themes for building WordPress websites.

The themes are both professionally designed, offer extensive customization and compatible with WordPress third-party plugins.

Which one would you pick?

We will look at the two themes in this comparison and see which features are available, how lightweight and fast they both run, as well as what options there are for pricing and what you can expect if you choose a paid plan.

Astra theme: A brief Overview

Astra, a WordPress theme popular for many years and highly recommended by WordPress developers and designers. Brainstorm Force developed other WordPress plugins, themes and templates.

It’s a fast and customizable theme that is perfect for different types of websites, such as blogs, portfolios, or e-commerce websites. Also, it’s SEO optimized and offers integrated schema markup code.

WordPress has been installed over one million times, received 5000+ positive reviews and a rating of 5/5. It is constantly updated and improved.

Astra, like many Classic WordPress Themes, offers both free and paid options. With the premium option, you can get additional features and customize your theme.

OceanWP theme: an Overview

OceanWP, a popular and classic WordPress theme has evolved over time. It was once one of the more customizable themes and was used to build many websites.

This is a lightweight and customizable theme that is great for every type of website – business, e-commerce, blogs, and so on. It’s fast, great for SEO, and compatible with RTL languages and translations.

This theme is highly rated with 5/5 from more than 5000 reviews. It has also been installed over 700,000 times, which makes it a very popular theme.

OceanWP is similar to Astra. It offers both a good, free version as well as more advanced premium plans that are tailored for specific requirements.

Astra vs OceanWP: Features

Astra as well as OceanWP both are WordPress classic themes. They both have thousands of active installations, great reviews, and free options.

What is more important, however, are the features that they have and their customization capabilities. You need to have a theme that is reliable, but you also want the ability to customize it.

We will now discuss the main features that a WordPress theme must have in order to create beautiful, modern websites.

Both themes come with pre-made templates, both free and professional. These can be quickly imported. Just replace the default text and images with your own and you’ll have a beautiful website within minutes.

Other Features

General features of WordPress themes include page layouts, container layouts, button customization, and similar things found in Appearance > Customize from the WordPress dashboard.

These features help you to customize your website’s global layout and various styles of elements.

Astra provides a variety of options for customizing different aspects of the site and styling.

Astra offers a wide range of features that you can customise.

• Container layout
• Buttons
• Breadcrumbs
• Style and layout of pages
• Sidebars

There are many options to choose from, including sizes, paddings and layout options.

OceanWPOffers similar options There are different sections in the customizer. However, Astra Customizer has a better interface, and it’s easier to navigate.

OceanWP allows you to change the settings of various elements on your site.

• Container layout
• Page titles
• Sidebars
• Buttons
• Forms

You can also enable/disable certain performance features, such as lightboxes, scroll effects and emojis.

Both themes offer all the necessary settings to change your website’s global layout and styling. Astra’s customizer, however, is easier to use and more organized.

Colour and Typography

Color and typography are important design aspects in websites, and if a theme doesn’t offer them in a free version, then you need to change the theme.

But that’s not the case in Astra and OceanWP because bot themes allow you to choose color palettes and fonts for different headings and paragraphs.

Although they look similar, the two themes differ in some ways.

AstraYou can select the font you want for paragraphs, headings or both. You can also set the font size and weight for your desktop computer, tablet or mobile device.

But if you want to change fonts for the footer, header, and other sections, it’s in different sections.

OceanWP is a nonprofit organization that provides ocean-related services.The typography is all in one spot. This includes fonts that can be used for headings, paragraphs, menus, titles of pages, etc.

Astra has a better color scheme. Astra allows you to choose up to nine different colors. These colors can then be assigned to elements like buttons, links and headings.

OceanWP lets you choose separate colors for each of these elements. Astra, although it is similar to Astra in its functionality, makes updating your palettes much easier.

The Header Footer Builder

Any WordPress site must have header and footer builders. If a theme doesn’t offer it, you’d have to install an additional plugin for it, which is not good.

Astra and OceanWP, however, allow you to customize your website’s header and footer in different ways.

Astra’s header and footer creator allows for three rows of three columns each. Add different elements to the columns in order to make a complex header or footer.

OceanWP on the contrary offers predefined designs for the header, and a variety of settings that can be used to customize it. For the footer it offers a widget-based system that isn’t very intuitive.

For example, if you want to create a header with OceanWP, you have to choose between different styles such as minimal, transparent, vertical, etc., and that’s it. You don’t have many options.

Astra’s header and footer builder is the best because you can build headers and footers of almost any design.

Blog Features

A blog is a very useful tool, particularly for SEO. Blogs are used by many SEO companies to increase the content of websites and help them rank higher in search engine results.

Both themes have many customization options for creating beautiful blog designs.

Astra and OceanWP both offer similar customization features for blogs. You can not only customize archives, but also individual posts.

Blog archives allow you to customize a number of things, including the container layout and article cards, as well as sidebar options. Both themes offer similar customization options, but Astra offers a cleaner interface.

Single-post customization is also possible. Create beautiful, simple, and contemporary single-post styles.

Display or hide elements. Add a sidebar to the side. Choose container width.

Astra’s interface is a bit more modern and intuitive, which allows for easier creation of blog sections.

Custom Posting

Many times when you create websites using WordPress, custom post types are required. If you run a website that reviews movies, for example, rather than creating the reviews as WordPress posts, you could create a custom Movies post with a plugin.

It is always good to have a separate layout for custom articles and default posts.

Astra is better than OceanWP when it comes to custom posts customization, as you can customize both custom archives and individual posts.

Astra theme is among those that offer this functionality. Unfortunately, OceanWP doesn’t support custom post customization.

The WooCommerce Features

Astra or OceanWP are both good themes to use if you plan on building a WooCommerce e-commerce website. This is because these themes offer many customization options.

Astra, despite having similar WooCommerce settings to the other theme, is more intuitive.

Astra allows you to display and hide product sections. You can also add a sidebar and create a modern, clean page.

OceanWP provides similar customization settings for product catalogs, but the overall design is outdated.

These are some elements that you could use on your product page using both themes.

• The Category
• Name of the Product
• Price
• Ratings
• Product Meta
• Product description

Both themes offer settings to customize pages like the cart, product catalog and checkout.

Astra vs OceanWP: Speed

The speed of WordPress sites is one downside. A slow website can cause you to lose visitors.

WordPress as a CMS isn’t slow. Actually, it’s quite fast, but the speed of a website depends on many things, such as hosting, how well it was built, how many plugins it uses, and so on.

We can’t stress enough how important it is to choose the fastest WordPress hosting.

WordPress themes are an essential part of the website’s speed. You should always select a theme that is lightweight and quick.

Both themes were tested for speed to determine which is more agile.

For these speed tests we used GTmetrix PSI, both of which are excellent tools for determining how fast a web page is and what can be done to fix speed problems.

We used two different types of testing to get better results:

• Speed TestInstalling WordPress fresh without plugins and content, we installed the theme only.
• The Business Template Speed testThe theme was installed on a fresh WordPress installation, but we imported one of the templates. Both themes were very similar, both in terms of layout and plug-ins.

Cloudways WordPress Host with Digital Ocean is the server we selected.

• 1GB RAM
• The Core
• Store 25GB of Data
• 1TB of Bandwidth

Let’s dive in and see the results.

Speed Test Clean

For the speed test we installed only the theme, without plugins, themes, images or other content.

GTMetrix

GTmetrix has performed a clean test on the Astra Theme.

Results #1

Result # 2

Result # 3

You can clearly see that it is loading. It takes 0.7 seconds to complete the process.The size of the webpage is only 25KBThere was only one 7 Requests.

Google Speed Insights

Google Speed Insights shows the results of the desktop and mobile versions:

Results #1

Result # 2

The clean Astra theme has proven to be very light and quick.

GTMetrix

Now let’s see the results for clean OceanWP with GTmetrix:

Results #1

Result # 2

Result # 3

Results are nearly identical. OceanWP only took 0.8 second to load.

Google PageSpeed insights

Google PSI results:

Results #1

Result # 2

Astra, and OceanWP are both clean themes. Both themes are fast and light.

The Template Speed Test

Now let’s see how fast they are with a full website with content, pages, images, etc. Remember that images weren’t optimized and there were no caching plugins installed.

In OceanWP we selected the Coach template and in Astra we imported the Limousine Rental Agency Template.

They both have sections that contain text, headings and images. The themes are both using Elementor and WPForms. They also use Starter Templates and Ocean Extra for OceanWP and Astra.

GTmetrix

The results of the Astra theme using GTmetrix and PSI are shown below:

Results #1

Results 2

These are the results using OceanWP and the same Website Speed Tools:

Results #1

Result # 2

As you can see, Astra has great results for desktops, and it’s slightly better than OceanWP. Both themes are similar on mobile but have minor issues.

The images we used were of high-quality and had not been optimized. The results are much improved after you optimize the images and install the plugin.

Even with Elementor, both themes run very quickly. The test results showed Astra to be slightly faster than OceanWP.

Astra vs OceanWP: Pricing & Plans

Astra and OceanWP are both free and offer many features that make it easy to create a variety of types of sites.

They also offer premium plans that include additional features. Does a premium design theme make a website more modern?

First of all, let’s see what premium plans they offer and what features are included in premium plans.

You can select between the annual or lifetime option for both themes.

Astra Pro and Essential Bundle are the Astra Premium Plans. The license can be used on any number of sites.

OceanWP offers Personal, Business, and Agency plans, and you can install the software on multiple websites.

Astra Pro has many benefits.

• Build headers and footers with advanced features
• Blog Layouts
• White Label
• Sticky header
• Mega menu
• Typography
• Premium templates

OceanWP’s premium features aren’t as good. These are some examples:

• Pro demo templates
• Exclusive Premium Extensions
• Elementor section library
• Flaticon and Freepik Icon import

You can find a list of all the features on their website. The full list is available on the website.

If you upgrade to the pro version, Astra offers a much more comprehensive set of features.

The following is a summary of the information that you will find on this page.

Both Astra and OceanWP make excellent, free WordPress themes. Both themes offer starter templates as well as a wide range of customization options. They are also known for being fast and lightweight.

Upgrade to the Pro version if you need more features.

Astra has many more features than the other theme in our comparison.

We have to point out that these themes also work well with the Gutenberg page editor and Elementor.

Hope you enjoyed this Astra and OceanWP comparison. Please feel free to comment with any questions.

Author’s Bio

Lasha Chankseliani, a WordPress developer and SEO expert. He currently works for SEO agency Alpaca and has over 5 years’ experience. He is also interested in blogging and affiliate marketing.