Ella and Astra are both highly popular webshop themes. Both themes can be used for the construction of very nicely looking webshops. Ella (Shopify) vs Astra (WordPress), which is the better theme? We start with Ella which does not mean it would be better.
The Ella Theme
The Ella theme came on the market in 2014 and has not been sitting still since then. The theme has become the best-selling theme for shopify on Themeforest. It could well be the best-selling theme at all for Shopify since Debutify, an even more successful theme, has not been out for very long.
Ella Theme's Rating
Many people rely on the rating of others when they buy a product. The average rating that the Ella Theme has built up over the years is 4.81 out of 5. This is an impressive rating for themes, regardless of which CMS.
Ella Theme's Loading Speed
I just did a speedtest myself for the demo shown on Themeforest and you can see the results below. Of course that is not an optimal situation within the Themeforest website, but I could not discover any site of theirs.
They themselves give much better results for their speed than those that came out from my test. You can see this pictured below. These results can certainly be true under optimal conditions such as very good server and cache plugin.
Ella Theme Homepage Demos
The Ella theme offers more than enough variety to choose your homepage. When building a shop, full site demos are of course not necessary. The number of 50+ well-maintained demo layouts should certainly be sufficient.
The Ella-Theme is "Mobile First"
Mobile menu, discount for bundles, Quick Shopping, Quick Cart Editing.
Mobile-optimized menus are the best. This prevents customers feeling overwhelmed by too many menu options.
Discounts for bundles. Your store can offer maximum value to customers by offering upsell/cross-sell features, rather than limiting them to products they already have.
Quick Shopping gives buyers an easy and powerful way to shop online right from their homepage or category page.
Quick cart editing is a great way for buyers to modify products in their side cart. It simplifies the complex process of switching to cart pages to change other variants.
Increase your site's Revenue
Below you see a hypothetical situation how your website can grow into a great success in the coming year. My personal opinion is that only by using this theme that will certainly not happen. The best Shopify theme I know for revenue is by far the Debutify theme.
Many different Headers & Footers
Choose from a whole range of beautiful footers and headers. With a few simple clicks you have a completely different header. Different headers and footers can also be used in different parts of the shop.
8 different Mega-Menu styles
Mega menus are in vogue. It gives a website or webshop a professional look and everything is easy to find for visitors. Unfortunately, mega-menus can only be filled for medium to very large shops with a lot of content.
Product Bulk Editor
The Ella theme has integrated a bulk editor for the products. Very handy, because of course you don’t want to make product by product adjustments to, for example, your prices. And especially not if you have more than 1000 products in your shop.
Nice features in the Ella Theme
The Ella theme is full of them, but I’m not going to list them all here. Below are a few nice features that the Ella theme offers. These kinds of features make your work easier, make shopping more convenient for your customers and generate more sales.
Brands Alphabet
Gone are the days of searching for logos in Google and making them all the same size in Photoshop and displaying them on your site via a carousel plugin. The Ella Brands Alphabet probably has all the logos you are looking for ready-made available. This saves you a lot of time.
Languages and Currencies
Many webshops use multiple languages and currencies. The Ella theme shows this very nicely and everything works in one go without having to tune everything for it. Very nice.
“Before you leave” (below) is a nice feature that a lot of professional shops are using. If someone tries to leave your website, this will not be possible and a pop up will show some offer.
Ella Theme Review Conclusion
I’m going to put an end to this Ella theme review. I assume you got a good impression, this is a very cool theme. The Ella theme has everything and more for building a successful webshop, and it is not for nothing that it is one of the best-selling themes for Shopify. If you like to know more about the Ella theme, read on on their own website. Recommended!
Let’s continue this Astra vs Ella comparison 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.
Astra vs Ella Conclusion
These are both great themes, and both are also great for E-commerce. As good as Astra is, the Ella theme is simply one of the very best themes available for building webshops. It is really hard to make a decision, I give Astra a slight edge. For any type of website other than web shops, I obviously prefer Astra. Of course these themes use different CMS systems, so if you have a preference for WordPress or Shopify that will also have to be taken into account when deciding which theme is more suitable for you.