Astra vs Newspaper Theme comparison 💥
Astra Theme (Newspaper vs Astra)
Discover what makes Astra a preferred choice for WordPress developers...
In this review of Astra, we delve into why it remains a popular WordPress theme with over 2.3 million active users. Known for its superior speed, adaptability, and seamless integrations, Astra makes building professional websites easier than ever. Whether you’re crafting an eCommerce store, a blog, or a corporate website, Astra offers the tools to bring your vision to life.
Compared to alternatives like GeneratePress, Astra stands out with its intuitive design and expansive feature set. It is not just a theme; it’s a comprehensive toolkit for creating high-performing, visually stunning websites.
Advertisement
Website speed plays a vital role in online success. Faster websites rank higher on search engines and improve user retention. Astra’s lightweight and optimized design ensures your website loads quickly without sacrificing quality or functionality.
Astra 4.0 sets a new benchmark
The release of Astra 4.0 introduces an impressive array of enhancements, making it even easier to create standout websites. With faster loading speeds, improved customization tools, and innovative features, Astra 4.0 solidifies its position as a leading WordPress theme.
Spectra 2.0 revolutionizes web design
The inclusion of Spectra 2.0 brings a dynamic page builder to Astra’s suite of tools. With over 50 widgets and a user-friendly interface, Spectra 2.0 simplifies website creation and enhances design capabilities for users of all skill levels.
What users love about Astra
Astra enjoys high ratings on WordPress.org, cementing its reputation as a reliable and versatile theme. With over a million active installations of the free version, it continues to earn praise for its performance and ease of use.
Tailored for eCommerce success
Astra is a go-to solution for eCommerce sites. Its compatibility with WooCommerce and features like Infinite Scroll, Quickview, and customizable grid layouts make it ideal for creating efficient and user-friendly online stores.
Start fast with pre-designed templates
Astra’s library of over 180 professionally designed starter templates allows users to launch their websites quickly. These templates cater to a wide variety of industries, providing polished and adaptable designs to kickstart projects effortlessly.
Performance that delivers
Known for its exceptional performance, Astra is optimized for speed and reliability. Its lightweight structure ensures smooth operation even with media-heavy or resource-intensive content.
Works with leading page builders
Astra seamlessly integrates with popular page builders like Elementor and Beaver Builder, offering limitless customization options. Whether designing from scratch or enhancing existing templates, Astra supports a wide range of creative possibilities.
SEO-ready with schema markup
Astra incorporates built-in schema markup, improving search engine visibility and boosting your site’s SEO rankings. This feature ensures better indexing and increased organic traffic.
Supports educational platforms
With tools like LearnDash and LifterLMS, Astra is an excellent choice for creating online learning platforms. These integrations enable educators to develop interactive and user-friendly courses for their audience.
Custom headers and footers
Designing unique headers and footers is simple with Astra Pro. These features ensure your site reflects your brand identity while maintaining a cohesive, professional look.
A feature-rich WordPress solution
Astra’s advanced features, such as layout customization and typography settings, make it a versatile solution for any website. Whether you’re running a blog or managing an enterprise site, Astra provides the flexibility you need.
Pricing and final thoughts
Astra delivers unmatched value with an annual plan starting at $59. For developers and agencies, the lifetime license is an investment that pays off in long-term savings and expanded capabilities.
Newspaper Theme (Newspaper vs Astra)
Newspaper Evalution
In our search for the best theme to build a news website, we quickly came across the best-selling theme in this category. The Newspaper theme recently released its latest version, Newspaper 12 or the 11th version already.
The Newspaper 12 theme was developed by Tag-Div, a Power Elite author on Themeforest. The Newspaper theme is made to handle large amounts of content and has a bold and elegant design combined with the power of versatility. Moreover, Newspaper is perfect to give websites a professional look. It can easily be considered the best news theme for WordPress and is an indispensable theme in the collection of new and experienced WP-users in [2025].
Newspaper 12 design
One does not have to be a professional web designer to make a fantastic news website with this theme. This theme is perfect for magazine, blog, and news websites. It offers a multitude of responsive & retina-ready options for beautiful display of your website on small screen devices. Newspaper also allows you to choose how to display your content on desktop, laptop, mobile, and tablet.
The Newspaper Theme is always an excellent choice whether you want a website with a beautiful design, a lightning-fast one, or one that is flexible. It comes with over 90+ great pre-made demo designs (30 new ones since the last upgrade) and a gallery of 1000+ pre-built design templates named Tag-Div Cloud Library.
Import ready-made website demos
With the WordPress theme Newspaper, you no longer have to search and test to find the right design. It comes with many ready-made sites for you to choose from. Newspaper offers you a custom import system, so you can preview a demo and install it with a simple click. You can also load the demo with content or just the design. If you decide to uninstall, the import system clears the website of all demo components, leaving your pages as they were before.
Newspaper 12 front-end
Newspaper has a frontend page builder called Tag-Div Composer. This tool helps you edit pages effortlessly by way of drag & drop. Place the elements exactly how you envisioned it. To make things even easier, you can make difficult CSS customizations with just a few clicks.
Arranging and styling elements is now even easier. So you no longer need coding knowledge to make your dream come true. With this powerful tool, you can build amazingly beautiful pages super fast. Newspaper comes with 22 multifunctional shortcodes that you can use to create corporate, personal, and e-commerce websites. With the Tag-Div Composer, you can work quickly and easily. That way, people really feel like working on their website.
So 1000+ elements, layouts, sections, headers, footers, and home pages await you in the Tag-Div Cloud Library. Just click on what you want. For example, a 404 page, author design, footer, or search page, and import the elements you like from the Tag-Div servers to your website.
Tag-Div composer video
As you can see the video gives to Newspaper 9, but this is the latest Tag-Div video out there at the moment.
Pages and categories
The theme offers a large number of elements and shortcodes, numerous large grid style combinations, ready-made category page templates, and 25 predefined blocks. There are also five Flex Block elements that provide additional flexibility and allow you to publish and customize articles in a versatile way. You can emphasize the "above the fold" section by using large grids that are displayed across the entire width. Your website will have a professional look with its custom features such as image slider gallery, lightbox effects, social media counters, news ticker, video menus, and many different widgets.
The Tag-Div Composer recently introduced a Fonts Style tab that allows you to create custom typography for any existing block or element. You can combine nice fonts, size, or line height. So the process is natural, without implying code knowledge or additional font customization plugins that might slow down your website's performance. Another handy tool is the Translation Panel, which helps you load one of the dozens of available translations and automatically convert a list of strings. Practically every other theme needs extra plugins for this.
Intelligent advertisements
In this Newspaper 12 review, we also observed Tag-Div's modern ad system that allows you to monetize ads without compromising the reader's experience. You can easily earn money with your website by placing ads in the 18 permanent advertising spaces. These are in prominent places such as the header, footer, article, and sidebar areas. Moreover, the Newspaper theme comes with an option to display ads on individual posts or pages, using Tag-Div Composer's page editor and the Single Post Content or Ad Box elements. You can use AdSense or HTML code.
Newspaper 12 review functionality
All options and settings, the plugins, demo sites, and website monitoring are collected in one place, the Theme Panel of Newspaper. Everything is neatly and clearly organized, and all options of the theme are easy to use for every layperson. The Tag-Div Composer is specially prepared for building blogs, news, and magazine websites, and gives you a unique way to create pages, posts, and headers. All results can be viewed in real-time, which makes the editor extra powerful. The Tag-Div Composer offers you performance and reliability.
Newspaper theme header builder
More and more themes have a header builder. Newspaper also has a header builder that is very handy. In the past, people wanted to change their header but only had a few options that just did not work out how they wanted it. Then no progress was made without knowledge of HTML. Those days are over with these skilled header builders who are practically capable of anything.
Free premium plugins and widgets
The theme offers eight premium plugins: Tag-Div Composer, Tag-Div Cloud Library, Social Counter, Tag-Div Mobile Theme, and Tag-Div Newsletter. The theme also features the top slider plugin Revolution Slider and the Bakery Pagebuilder. You can keep your audience informed through the newsletter plugin. It is equipped with eight beautiful standard designs, so that your newsletter is always in the style of your website. The plugin for Tag-Div Newsletter is compatible with well-known sites such as MailChimp, Mailerlite, and Feedburner.
The Newspaper 12 theme has also been tested with the WP Super Cache, Contact Form 7, bbPress, BuddyPress, WP Avatar plugins, Font Awesome 4 Menus, Jetpack, WooCommerce, and Yoast. Newspaper also comes with a custom plugin to help you show off your social networking stats - the Tag-Div Social Counter plugin. You also have two unique social media widgets (Instagram and Pinterest). In addition, the Tag-Div author has created 35 custom widgets that you can easily drag to your website.
Newspaper is ready for AMP. The functionality is already integrated into the mobile-theme plugin for fast results, so you can take advantage of all the mobile-theme functionality on your AMP-pages. In addition, the theme raises standards for page loading and mobile optimization.
Fast charging times
As can be seen below, Newspaper has 10 beautiful load time notes in the main speed tests like those of Google and GT-Metrix.
Newspaper design examples
Newspaper 12 review conclusion
We are dealing with one of the better themes for [2025]. It is not yet in my top 10 of the best WordPress themes, but maybe that will change for next year. Newspaper 12 has proven to be the best theme for blogs and news sites for me. Well there are other very good themes that are certainly close. Newspaper 12 is equipped with the WP Bakery Pagebuilder which is another thorn in my side. This is a good but very outdated page builder, it could be much better. Apart from that, I only see very good qualities for the rest. With this theme you can go in any direction. It is not only a news theme but just a multipurpose theme. The theme costs $59, a more or less standard price for good themes and the theme is definitely worth the money.
Rating features with stars ⭐
| Feature | Astra | Newspaper 12 |
|---|---|---|
| Page Builder | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| Speed | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐ |
| SEO Optimization | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| Customization | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| Mobile Design | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| Customer Support | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| Updates | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| Ease of Use | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| Price | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
| Demo Sites | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ |
FAQs
1. Is Astra better for e-commerce than Newspaper 12?
Both themes are excellent, but Astra offers faster loading times and more flexibility, making it a better choice for e-commerce.
2. Can I use Elementor with both themes?
Yes, both Astra and Newspaper 12 are compatible with Elementor. However, Astra integrates more seamlessly with it.
3. Which theme is more cost-effective?
Astra is more cost-effective as it can be used on multiple sites with one license, whereas Newspaper 12 requires a separate license for each site.
4. Do both themes offer good customer support?
Yes, both themes provide excellent customer support, but Astra's support is often praised for being more responsive.
5. Which theme has better SEO features?
Astra has slightly better SEO features due to its faster loading times and built-in schema markup.
Advertisement
