How to Build Quick Sites with Astra

Astra simplifies building quick sites, providing an excellent starting point for developers and business owners. 

Instead of creating one from scratch, you can swiftly generate a well-designed website with Astra, significantly reducing the time needed for website development or design concepts. 

Here’s how you can do it:

Building Your Website With Astra and Starter Templates

Building great websites quickly is possible with Starter Templates – our library of more than 100 ready-to-use templates available to all Astra theme users. Starter Templates is a free plugin that imports fully designed website templates made by our team.

After installing and activating the Astra theme, follow these steps to access and install the Starter Templates plugin:

• Access Plugins > Add New Plugin section from your WordPress dashboard.

• Search and install the Starter Templates plugin on your dashboard.

• You can find Starter Templates under Appearance > Starter Templates once it’s installed and activated.

• Import your website from our wide selection of classic templates or use the AI website builder.

• If you opted for classic templates, just search and choose any template you prefer to start using it.

Note: While our free templates offer great options, accessing templates marked with the “Premium” icon requires upgrading to premium starter templates.

Also, if you like just one or a few pages, you can import pages individually.

To help you with building your websites, we created the Starter Templates Walkthrough docs. Here, you will find all the details you might need about importing templates and building websites with Starter Templates.

Why Choose Astra for Your Website?

Having a fast-loading website is a must today. But once you start building your website for the first time you might notice that it’s not that simple to achieve.

To start with, the Astra theme is a fast, lightweight, and well-coded theme that works great on any hosting. But your theme is just one element of your website that affects your speed.

The choice of the Page Builder, adding various plugins for functionalities, quality of your website optimization, and other factors can significantly damage your loading time.

One of the most underrated factors is hosting. Sometimes, no matter how well-built your website is, having bad hosting will cripple your speed to mediocre results. Here, you’ll find some basic guidelines on how to find the best option for your websites.

Some of the hosting options you might encounter are:

• Shared Hosting: The most economical option, sharing server resources with other websites. While suitable for small sites, performance may suffer during traffic surges. Consider upgrading as your site grows.

• VPS Hosting: The next step up, sharing physical servers but with guaranteed resources. Ideal for smaller to mid-sized websites, including e-commerce sites.

• Dedicated Hosting: Rent a whole physical server for full resource control. Requires server management skills but handles high workloads and traffic.

• Cloud Hosting: Multiple computers combine resources for reliable hosting with reduced downtime. Often unmanaged, requiring server management.

• Managed Hosting: Combines high-quality hardware with software setup, scalability, and WordPress optimization for a hassle-free experience.

Please check some of our recommendations or if you would like to find out more about hosting, and compare different hosting options take a look at our article Top 9 Fastest Managed WordPress Hosting Companies.

Further, be sure to test your website with tools like PageSpeed Insights and GT Metrix. These tools will show you what things should be improved on your website, as well as your server performance.

Also, keep in mind that every plugin you decide to add to your website has certain system requirements and configurations, so please check these out and adjust your settings accordingly.

You can check the minimum and recommended system requirements for the Astra theme and Starter Templates to be sure that everything works smoothly on your website.