The Astra theme is one of the most popular WordPress themes in the theme repository because Astra was designed with the goal of providing users with a combination of functionality and speed. The theme offers WordPress admins a high-level of customization features and even integrates the Elementor page builder tool.
According to the WordPress repository, it has been downloaded and installed more than 1 million times and has a rating of five stars from those who use it.
But there area lot of WordPress themes out there that claim to offer a lot of functionality while maintaining fast page load times, but the question is whether Astra lives up to its claims and reputation.
The ultimate question of “Is the Astra WordPress theme fast or slow” is exactly what our WordPress speed tests are designed to answer.
Our WordPress Plugin Testing Methodology
In order to determine whether the Astra WordPress theme could potentially slow down your WordPress site, we have designed a process to test the plugin for speed. Our goal is to provide fair and accurate testing that gives us baseline data to compare to.
We feel that first capturing baseline metrics allows us to effectively observe any negative speed impacts that occur when a plugin is installed and activated.
Our testing environment does not use any additional caching plugins or features, beyond what our host provides. We do not use any third-party Content Delivery Networks like Cloudflare and we don’t use any optimization features like script and CSS minification.
Essentially, our sandbox is just a basic WordPress implementation with a lightweight theme.
Establishing The Baseline Sandbox Environment And Content
Our methodology creates a basic WordPress installation using the Twenty Twenty theme for testing purposes. We call this environment our testing sandbox.
With the sandbox environment, we create a single post that uses 800 words of Lorem Ipsum text and three appropriately sized images for the Web. Each of the images is 1920 pixels wide and 1280 pixels high and are resized by the theme to responsively fit the screen. We feel that a post with 800 words, one featured image, and three images accurately represents an “average” blog post that can be found on most WordPress sites.
Again, no lazy loading, image compression, or optimization has been done other than the lazy loading features offered by WordPress.
With the sandbox environment and test post in place, we first baseline the environment for speed to determine how fast the test post loads without the Astra theme installed. This baseline gives us the metrics to compare to once we install and activate Astra.
To generate baseline metrics for the sandbox environment, we use multiple tests of three different speed testing tools.
- Google Page Speed Insights – We run the GPSI speed test five times and take the average scores of the five tests in order to determine the average desktop and mobile scores for the baseline testing post before the Astra theme is installed and configured.
- GTmetrix Speed Test – We run the GTmetrix speed test three times and take the average scores of the three tests in order to determine the average load time, page size, and number of requests for the baseline testing post before the Astra theme is installed and configured.
- Pingdom Speed Test – We run the Pingdom speed test three times and take the average scores of the three tests in order to determine the average load time, page size, and number of requests for the baseline testing post before the Astra theme is installed and configured.
With these baseline metrics captured, we have the necessary data to conduct the actual testing of the Astra WordPress theme.
The baseline data for the environment prior to installing and activating Astra was as follows:
From the results, our sandbox environment was generating very good scores via Google Page Speed Insights for desktop at 97 and a fairly respectable score of 83 on mobile.
Using GTmetrix and Pingdom to test the post, we are able to discern that the page loads under 1 second and the total page size came in at 345kb.
Essentially, the blog posts loads very quickly across all three tests.
Installing And Activating the Astra Theme And Testing Any Site Speed Impacts
Once the baseline data has been captured, we proceed on to installing and activating the Astra theme from the WordPress plugin repository. For testing purposes, we left all the configuration as basic as possible.
For Astra, that means we simply installed and activated the theme, as well as the recommended plugins that are bundled with the theme.
Using the same test post we leveraged to gather the baseline data, we followed the exact same data-gathering processes outlined above and gathered the resulting data.
By comparing the post-installation data to the baseline data, we are able to determine whether Astra has any negative speed impact on the testing post.
Results From The Astra Theme Testing
As seen in the testing results below, the Astra theme had positive mobile impacts on the Google Page Speed Insights Scores and minimal impacts on the GTmetrix web speed test, or the Pingdom web speed test.
This is a good indication that Astra has a well-written codebase that operates as a lightweight theme and can be used without worrying about slowing down your WordPress site. In fact, enabling Astra might actually speed up your site when compared to some other slower WordPress themes.
Observations Regarding The Astra Theme
Astra has developed a substantial following in the WordPress community and its clear why so many WordPress admins rely on it as a fast, lightweight theme. With these testing results, we can also be confident that the plugin is not slowing down our WordPress sites, but can also provide a speed increase if you are currently using a slow theme and are looking for an upgrade.
With respect to the Google Page Speed Insights scores, the Astra theme remained consistent providing excellent desktop scores and improved the mobile GPSI score from 83 to 97. Similarly, the GTmetrix and Pingdom tests demonstrated that there were virtually no measurable negative impacts caused by installing and activating Astra as the chosen theme.
As a result of our plugin testing, we give Astra the rating of:
FAST– This theme provides a optimal site speed scores, fast load times, and does not unnecessarily increase page size. As a result, installing and using this theme will not slow down your WordPress site and may even improve your site performance if you are currently using a slow WordPress theme.
NOTE: We tested the base configuration of Astra in this series of test. The more additional features you enable or add could cause additional slowdowns to your site. We highly recommend that you test any changes in functionality and configuration thoroughly to ensure that they don’t slow down your site.
To view our testing results sheet, you can download it in PDF format here.
Additional information that might be useful in your evaluation or our test results are as follows:
Test Date: 11-20-2020
Plugin Version Tested: 2.6.0
WordPress Version Used: 5.5.3
WordPress Theme Used: Astra
WordPress Theme Version: 1.5
Hosting Used: Siteground GoGeek
URL Of Test Post: https://sandbox.sitespeedsteps.com/site-speed-steps-testing-post/
Number Of Words In The Test Post: 800
Number Of Images In The Test Post: 3+Featured image
If you have questions about our testing methodology or results, please feel free to reach out via our contact form