Here we compare Botiga vs Astra, two very popular themes with a particularly high rating. Both themes have a pro version as well as a free version. Let’s quickly see which theme offers more value for money.
The Botiga Theme
A theme that is rapidly becoming popular is the Botiga Theme from the aThemes team. It has been around for less than a year and has already been installed on more than 10,000 websites and that will soon grow much further. Botiga specializes in building webshops and works with the CoBlocks plugin to make Gutenberg a kind of page builder. Let’s start this Botiga Theme review.
Botiga's Rating 5/5
The reason the theme’s popularity is growing so quickly is of course its quality, which is reflected in its particularly good rating. So far only one person has given it a 2, the rest all gave the maximum rating of 5, really remarkable. This theme has a very good future.
Botiga's Lay-outs
The Botiga shop only has 2 layouts at the time of writing this article, but those are beautiful designs. It is definitely worth clicking on the images below to see these layouts in real life.
Click the images below to see the live demos
Many people love the Botiga theme. It is simple and beautiful, which makes it a popular theme for shops. Today, there’s no need to be concerned about all the bells and whistles. Simple can still look elegant. Botiga is an example of this. This has the advantage that you don’t need to make many adjustments in order to create a webshop using it. You can complete your project in no more than a few hours.
Botiga's Shopping Features
Botiga is full of great shopping features that help you make your shop a great success and also give the shop a very professional look. Click on the images below to enlarge them.
Botiga Page Builder
Botiga does not use one of the well-known page builders by default, but can simply be operated with the standard Gutenberg editor. Not a particularly good page builder, of course, but since Botiga will mainly be used for creating web shops, that’s not a bad thing. People mainly work with Woocommerce for the products of course. If you also run a blog in addition to your wshop, I would definitely install Elementor.
Botiga Theme Review: Speed
Botiga loads very fast as shown in the image below. The test at GtMetrix was done with a good cache plugin installed.
Botiga Font/Colors
The Botiga theme has a very well-functioning system for both fonts and colors. You can choose from standard color palettes or you can compose your own colors.
Botiga Theme Review Conclusion
I close this Botiga Theme review with my opinion about the theme. I am very excited about both the free and pro versions of Botiga. The high rating that Botiga scores does not surprise me. The theme is great prepared for the construction of webshops, loads quickly and looks fresh and good. Recommended!
Let’s continue this Botiga vs Astra Review with the Astra Theme.
The Astra Theme
The Astra Theme has been very popular for years. In other words, the free version of Astra is firmly in place on WordPress.org. In addition, Astra also has a very well-selling pro version which is mainly known for its beautiful demo websites that are pre-prepared for various page builders. Over a million websites currently run on Astra. Let’s start this Astra Theme review with its rating as I always do.
Astra's Rating 5/5
Below you can see the fantastic rating and comments that Astra gets from users. Where it says “Astra theme and Element” Elementor is of course meant, indeed a more than great combination to use Astra and Elementor together within 1 website. Obviously anyone giving a 1 star rating to the number one theme on WordPress.org has no clue about theme or works for the competition.
Astra Theme Review Demo Websites
Let’s go straight to one of the strongest points of the Astra Theme, namely the many demo websites. These demo websites, the so-called Starter Templates, are made to further embroider with your favorite page builder. The demos were made with Elementor, Beaverbuilder, Brizy and Gutenberg. Well, I’m not that impressed with the last one, but the others are 3 top page builders. This means that if one of these 3 is your favorite page builder, the Astra theme can be your favorite theme.
As seen above one can just choose for which page builder demo website will be shown. Astra has one of the best full website demo’s that I have ever seen in themes and plenty as for just elementor there should be like 180 different designs already.
Astra's Woocommerce Possibilities
The WP-Astra Theme was built from the start on having super fast loading times and it had to excel in the possibilities and beautiful designs for webshops and that intention has been successful. The options that Astra offers for E-commerce websites are unprecedented and practically surpass any other theme, including specialized Woocommerce themes.
Below I´ll show a few of the many features Astra offers for Woocommerce that make your webshop to a professional looking online store.
Infinite scroll
Off canvas sidebar
Quick view
The Astra Theme has about 15 such features for webshops. It simply has all the gadgets one could wish for.
Astra comes with Schema Mark Up
WP-Astra comes standard with Schema Mark Up which adds rich snippets to your articles. That way your articles will be displayed in Google’s search result in a more effective way as seen in the image below, with or without Schema. I have tried it on an HTML-website, and implementing Schema by hand is just to much work and errors will be made. Astra adds the snippets automatically and if your article changes, so will the Schema Mark Up.
Do you want someting even better than Astra’s basic Mark Up, then go for the more professional version of it:
Astra Speed
WP-Astra’s basic code is only 25kb which makes Astra one of the fastest themes out there, if not the fastest. Have a look at the images below, if necessary give them a click to enlarge them. On the left we see a speedtest done at GtMetrix with stunning results. On the right you see what one of the most famous SEO companies thinks of the speed of the Astra Theme.
Astra Theme Extra Info
If you are planning to set up a website with WP-Astra for teaching courses, it is good to know that the theme is fully compatible with Learndash and LifterLMS. In addition, Astra has an excellent SEO, is 100% responsive on all devices. It’s all too much to explain here in this review so I advise you to take a look at the Astra website itself.
Astra Theme Review Conclusion
The Astra Theme excels on several fronts, including speed, countless options for webshops, beautiful designs that can be installed with 1 click and that for 4 different page builders. In addition, Astra has built-in Schema as standard and is compatible with all commonly used plugins. This makes Astra one of the best-selling themes of the moment and I can recommend it to everyone, especially in combination with Elementor Pro.
Botiga vs Astra Conclusion
My opinion regarding Botiga vs Astra: Any type of website can be built with both themes. Both themes load quickly and have beautiful demo websites. That said, it seems that both themes are practically the same, but that is not the case. Astra offers more of everything, and is better than Botiga at everything. In addition, Astra offers a lot of features that are not in Botiga. Astra is a much more developed and mature theme and the clear winner.