Selecting the perfect WordPress theme for your new website can feel daunting with countless options available. Amidst all of these countless recommendations by everyone, Astra and Neve often stand out as popular choices. In this comprehensive comparison, we delve into the features of both themes to help you determine the ideal fit for your website.
Although before we get started, let us understand what Astra and Neve are really all about.
About Astra
Developed by Brainstorm Force (a major WordPress development company), Astra is one of the most advanced themes you can get your hands on in the WordPress repository. Since its launch, it has been steadily increasing in popularity due to its high speed and fast response time. It can be used to build all kinds of websites ranging from personal to business websites or an even eCommerce store. Astra gives users multiple layouts, color options, stylish headers, and a lot more.
About Neve
Developed by ThemeIsle (the team behind the super popular theme ‘Hestia’), Neve is a superfast, easily customizable, multi-purpose theme that is a ‘refreshed rebrand’ of Hestia. Neve is lightweight and sports a minimalist design, making it perfect for blogs, small businesses, startups, agencies, firms, e-commerce shops (WooCommerce storefront) as well as personal portfolio sites.
Astra vs Neve: Features
Some of the key features of Astra include:
- With page load times as low as 50KB, Astra ensures blazing-fast loading speeds for your website.
- Astra provides versatile templates suitable for various website types, from blogs to complex eCommerce platforms.
- Astra empowers you to personalize templates or craft your website entirely from scratch with limitless design modifications.
- Astra’s free version offers robust design features, ensuring a secure and feature-rich WordPress theme at no cost.
- Astra seamlessly integrates with leading page builders like Elementor and Beaver Builder, as well as other essential plugins for enhanced functionality.
Some of the key features of Neve include:
- Neve is compatible with top-page builders like Gutenberg, Elementor, Brizy, Beaver Builder, Visual Composer, SiteOrigin, and Divi, ensuring flexibility and ease of use.
- Neve empowers you to customize website headers and footers effortlessly.
- Neve enables you to curate your desired products and add them to your wishlist for future purchase convenience.
- Neve provides a simple toggle option for controlling product metadata visibility.
- Neve facilitates tailored checkout experiences by allowing customization of field visibility. You can choose to hide certain segments.
- Neve offers a diverse range of customizable starter sites, including numerous choices tailored for eCommerce businesses.
Keep in mind that I’ve barely scratched the surface. When it comes to features, Neve and Astra are both juggernauts in their own right. While they may differ from each other, they tend to be pretty similar too.
Astra vs Neve: Speed and SEO
Speed and SEO are some of the most crucial things when it comes to WordPress themes, largely because they directly impact user experience and search engine visibility.
Both Astra and Neve are superfast and built with speed and performance in mind. So fast that they consistently rank among the fastest WordPress Themes of all time.
On the hunt for the fastest WordPress theme, Kinsta conducted a speed test of some of the most popular WordPress themes.
The process of testing the speed proceeded as follows: Initially, the theme was installed and activated on a blank WordPress sandbox installation, ensuring uniformity in WordPress hosting and avoiding any complications with other plugins or site files. The themes remained untouched, without additional media, menus, pages, posts, or demo content.
Subsequently, the website with the theme underwent assessment through the GTmetrix Speed Test and an evaluation via the Pingdom Speed Test. The themes were tested using the PageSpeed Insights Test as well to assess their performance on both mobile and desktop platforms. Finally, the themes were also subjected to the Byte Check TTFB Test, providing insights into Time to First Byte, with an option for further exploration through a comprehensive guide on reducing TTFB.
You can read all about their methodology here.
Theme | GTmetrix Score | Pingdom Grade | PageSpeed Insights (Mobile) | PageSpeed Insights (Desktop) | TTFB (Time To First Byte) |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Astra | 100% | 98 | 100 | 100 | 47ms |
Neve | 100% | 98 | 100 | 100 | 51ms |
As you can see, both Astra and Neve compare similarly with minor differences in TTFB. TTFB stands for Time To First Byte, and as the name suggests it reflects how long it takes the first byte of data to go from the server to the user. The less data, the better.
This just goes to show how both themes prioritize speed. As I said earlier, Speed and SEO are crucial aspects that help your website rank higher. With Google now favoring faster-loading mobile sites for higher search rankings, both Astra and Neve achieved a perfect score of 100 on PageSpeed Insights (Mobile version).
Astra vs Neve – Starter Templates
Starter Templates by Astra
A good selection of starter templates helps simplify the website creation process. Astra and Neve both feature an extensive library of starter templates that are suited to meet the requirements of businesses of all kinds.
For starters, Astra features over 250+ pre-built starter templates. But that’s not it. Astra’s one-click installer simplifies the entire setup process, allowing you to swiftly launch your websites without any hassle.
These templates are not just visually appealing; they are crafted for high conversion rates, and expertly designed to captivate your audience while being performance-optimized for swift loading times. This ensures that your website not only looks great but also delivers a seamless browsing experience to visitors.
You can customize and tailor these templates to suit your brand identity. Whether viewed on a desktop, tablet, or smartphone, these templates are fully responsive, guaranteeing a consistent and polished appearance across all devices.
Starter Templates by Neve
Similarly to Astra, Neve’s Starter Templates library streamlines the website creation process by offering ready-made designs that can be imported effortlessly. With new designs continuously added to the collection each month, you’ll have access to a growing repository of fresh and contemporary options. Neve also features single-page templates where you can import individual templates from different starter sites. With this nifty little feature, you can mix and match elements to create unique and personalized website designs.
The Template Cloud is another feature that enhances flexibility by enabling you to save your custom templates in the Neve Cloud account. This allows for seamless transfer between websites and integrates smoothly with popular page builders, ensuring a hassle-free experience. However, this feature is limited to the paid versions only.
All the templates are designed in such a way that they prioritize Core Web Vitals to ensure that every starter site meets Google’s standards for optimal performance. By focusing on speed and user experience, Neve’s Starter Templates ensures a high-performing website that not only looks great but also delivers an exceptional browsing experience.
Astra vs Neve: Different types of Integrations
Both the Astra and Neve themes offer seamless integrations with a variety of plugins and tools, enhancing the functionality and versatility of WordPress websites.
Astra integrates smoothly with popular page builders like Elementor, Beaver Builder, and Gutenberg, allowing you to create highly customizable layouts without any coding knowledge. Also, Astra seamlessly integrates with leading e-commerce plugins such as WooCommerce, providing you with the tools to set up and manage online stores efficiently. Its support for SEO plugins like Yoast SEO and Rank Math, along with built-in schema markup, ensures optimized content for better search engine visibility.
Similarly, Neve excels in integration as well, seamlessly connecting with page builders like Elementor and Brizy, allowing you to design and customize your websites effortlessly. Neve also offers smooth integration with WooCommerce, enabling you to create and manage online stores efficiently. Its compatibility with SEO plugins and built-in support for languages written from right to left (RTL) has found even more fan following.
Moreover, Neve’s AMP readiness ensures fast loading times and improved mobile usability, essential for providing a seamless browsing experience across devices. With these integrations, both Astra and Neve themes provide users with powerful tools to create professional, feature-rich WordPress websites tailored to their specific needs and preferences.
Astra vs Neve: WooCommerce Integration
Astra and Neve, both sport different WooCommerce integrations that help in boosting your online store’s performance.
For starters, Astra’s sheer high speed helps not only enhance user experience but also earns favor with Google’s search rankings. It seamlessly integrates with a wide range of WooCommerce plugins with an array of features that is designed to elevate your webshop’s status.
One of these features includes the Infinite Scroll which enhances the shopping experience by providing a continuous flow of products. Astra also sports adaptable grid settings for tailored displays, a sleek off-canvas sidebar for navigation ease, quick view, and a dropdown cart to add further convenience, making it a rounded convenient shopping experience for the end user.
However, Neve stands up to Astra pretty well when it comes to WooCommerce integration. Neve has its own set of nifty little features that can help in maximizing conversions for your online store. You can streamline the entire shopping experience for your customers with optimized checkout layouts and a Sticky Cart feature, ensuring smooth navigation for your customers. The Quick View option allows customers to explore product details instantly, while the Wishlist feature fosters customer loyalty by enabling them to save their favorite products for future purchases.
Neve also hosts plenty of typography options allowing you to customize both catalog and single product pages to match your brand’s aesthetic. The off-canvas sidebar makes product filtering a breeze, enhancing the browsing experience.
But that’s not it. Neve also features a seamless add-to-cart functionality ensuring that potential sales are not lost due to sluggish processes. Neve also empowers you to highlight exclusive products, enticing customers to increase their cart value. Plus, the Product Gallery Slider presents your merchandise in an engaging carousel format, captivating visitors and encouraging exploration.
The bottom line is that Astra and Neve both excel at WooCommerce integrations. Both the themes are built for speed and integrating various add-ons as well that will help your online store flourish.
Astra vs Neve – Reddit’s Take
Reddit is a micro-blogging website where hundreds of anonymous users hop online and discuss about various things. From movies, games, and music to travel, work, life, and a lot more. If something’s on your mind and Google isn’t providing the answers, chances are you’ll discover what you need on Reddit. There are plenty of subreddits where folks talk about their favorite products too.
I’ve scoured through Reddit to source a few reviews for Astra and Neve. Authentic reviews by real people. None of the marketing stuff.
When asked whether it’s worth it go for paid versions of Astra, here’s what a couple of Redditors said:
‘My go-to fresh build is with Astra(free) and Elementor Pro. No need for pro theme version. I would say the same for Generate Press which is a very close second. If you can get GP on sale go with pro version then go for it.’ – u/fgd31
‘I used Astra Pro + Elementor Pro and decided to use only Astra Pro as I used Elementor only to create header and footer and for few pages.
But if you intend to heavily use Elementor then go with a free version of Astra theme.’ – u/AmazingHulk
‘Honestly, you will love Astra pro, the only problem is their native navigation menu bar, you need code to make it pretty, in my case, I used UAE Navigation Menu, but besides that Astra is solid.’ – u/LankySalamander4291
However, Redditor u/BobJutsu wasn’t too impressed with Astra for a number of reasons:
‘Its “ok” – “most” of the time. I have a lot of sites using astra with varying degrees of necessary support. In my experience, Brainstorm Force is more than happy to push janky updates that foobar things. I manage hundreds of sites (yes, plural) and their software (Astra, Ultimate Addons, and especially Convert Pro) is a constant source of conflicts. Currently we have tickets open with them because their custom layout feature simply stopped working if it was built, at ANY point in history, with anything other than the native block editor. Their Support’s answer was “its a known issue. We suggest downgrading versions and blocking updates”.’
And here’s what Redditors had to say about Neve:
‘I use Neve with Gutenberg blocks + Otter blocks. Works great for 99% of businesses and is fast. With loading speed being a large ranking factor it’s benefited SEO too.’ – u/PumpkinEater_69
‘Neve, fast and works great on desktop and mobile.’ – u/ArousedOgre
‘Neve is nice and very fast theme, probably the fastest one. I would add some blocks (GenerateBlocks or GreenShift) and try to rebuild one of your sites without Otter. And learn basic of CSS, at least. SiteOriginCSS is a nice tool to visualise CSS elements.’ – u/deleted
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