Impreza and Astra are sold through different marketplaces and are therefore no direct competitors. Impreza vs Astra, which is the better theme? We start with Impreza which does not mean it would be better.
The Impreza Theme
The first thing I noticed when I came to their website and clicked on “Live Preview” is how well-organized and well-arranged they present the features of their theme itself. These are intelligent people, and it bodes well for the Impreza Theme itself. Impreza came on the market in 2013 and belongs to the older guard themes that have been continuously improved to date and belong to the best. Let’s start with this review.
Impreza's Rating
They indicate that they have the highest rating on Themeforest with their theme. The rating is 4.89 out of 5 and is indeed very high. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a higher rating there, I don’t think so. Apparently people who bought this theme are extremely satisfied, very important if you are looking for a good theme to value the opinion of others.
Impreza's Loading Speed
Live Visual Builder
The title says Live Visual Builder and it is, but this is a tuned version of the already good WP-Bakery page builder. One of the first page builders that is still among the best. Impreza itself provides a number of “Builders” which are listed below.
Impreza Theme Header Builder
There are themes that offer header styles, which is not the same as a header builder. Styles give you different options for header types that can be installed with 1 click. However, a true eheader builder gives you unlimited freedom in the placement of items in your header. Impreza is therefore among the best themes in the field for headers.
Impreza's Grid Builder
The Grid Builder, in the past many people bought plugins for this kind of thing, for example photo presentation on the site. It is no longer necessary to spend money on this, it is simply in the themes themselves these days.
Their Woocommerce Builder
The Woo Builder, is something that Divi brought to the market. Divi basically develops everything that is new and the rest then copies it. A Woocommerce Builder gives you unlimited freedom to set up your cart, check out, product pages, my account, thank you page and more. I assume everyone knows what Woocommerce is, the most famous plugin for building shops.
Impreza Theme Review: Starter Sites
I count a good 80 starter sites. These are also called demos. A demo can be installed with a few clicks so that a complete website is immediately created with all important pages. You can then adapt this yourself to your house style by replacing the logo, texts and photos.
Portfolios
With the Grid Builder you can simply create your portfolio layouts yourself. Below is an example. For example, spin the items with the “Flip Box” that Impreza provides.
Impreza Theme Review Conclusion
Impreza scores in my review among the best themes on Themeforest. I like working with Elementor but I’ve worked with WP-Bakery for at least 5 years and it’s just a good page builder. The extras that Impreza adds makes everything even better. Impreza’s rating does not come out of the blue, it is a complete theme with which everything is possible. Recommended.
Let’s continue this Astra vs Impreza 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 Impreza Conclusion
I like Astra better, it is just way better overall. But also, the Impreza theme wants to see a separate expensive license for every website you want to build with it. This will quickly cost you a lot of money. You are better off with Astra or Divi that can be used on an unlimited sites and are also even better and more stable themes.