Under the “Performance” option (Customizer > Performance), you will find all the options and settings available with the Astra Theme that can help your websites’ performance.

Load Google Fonts Locally

When you use any Google font on your site, it requires a request to be sent to Google to fetch that font every time you load a page or post. This can harm your CLS points in the Core Web Vitals score. To help improve this, Astra Theme comes with a Self-Hosted Google Fonts feature built-in. This feature was added with Astra Theme 3.6.0 update. You can learn more about this feature in our Blog article.

This feature can be enabled by clicking on the “Load Google Fonts Locally” option.

Activating this feature will send only one Google Font API request, which will gather all of the font data & assets files from Google and store them locally on your server. Then, for any further requests, the Google fonts will be loaded using the locally stored files (until this option is enabled).

Preload Local Fonts

Once you have your local font files enabled, you can also preload these. By default, a browser will wait to load the font file until it starts “painting” visible content on the user’s screen (lazy loading). This may cause the situation where a browser is ready to load your websites’ text but needs to wait for the font file to be downloaded first, as it isn’t available yet. This situation slows down your page load and creates a bad user experience.

Preloading fonts will “tell” the browser to import the font early on, so the font is ready to be displayed as soon as the browser starts painting the text, which will result in a positive impact on your website performance.

To enable this option, just click on the “Preload Local Fonts” setting.

Flush Local Fonts Cache

As the fonts will be loaded and saved locally, any changes with Google Fonts will not be applied automatically. However, to keep your website fonts up to date, this feature will occasionally refresh the locally stored fonts. This will happen with the following actions:

• Your website will update fonts automatically every month
• Every time you save changes in the Customizer

If needed, you can update fonts manually any time you wish by clicking the “Flush Local Font Files” button.

Free Theme and Constantly Evolving

Astra theme started in 2017, and in 2020 it already had more than 1+ million active installs. Very quickly it became one of the Fastest, most Lightweight, and Highly Customizable themes for WordPress.

As you probably know WordPress is an open-source content management system. Being an open-source means that anybody can contribute to it. 

Keeping in mind that all of them have kind of unique living styles, you can imagine that the developers can have more or less different coding styles. That is why we have WordPress Coding Standards. Astra theme strictly follows these standards, using constantly very clean code, so it’s very simple for anybody to work with it. 

One of the reasons that theme is so popular, is that it’s constantly evolving and becoming more advanced while staying completely free. Since its beginnings we have released more than 200 theme updates, more than 270 templates, integrations with WooCommerce, LearnDash, LifterLMS, Easy Digital Downloads, etc.

When Gutenberg builder was added to WordPress 5.0 we made the Astra theme fully compatible from the start. We also added our free Ultimate Addons for Gutenberg that come already included with the Astra theme. And not to forget, the Astra themes’ compatibility with Elementor, Beaver Builder, and Brizy too. 

All of this was coupled with the constantly expanding list of the theme features as well as a solid number of fully compatible free and paid plugins.

Astra 3.0 Theme Improved the Customizer Speed

With each Astra theme update, we are working on improving the performance of the theme and especially the Customizer. And with Astra 3.0 we made quite a leap forward – our already fast Customizer became 70% faster!

Using React JS combined with a lazy-loading feature which is also incorporated in the customizer, our customizer dropped from great 3.5 seconds to loading in around 1 second.

Since then, most Astra theme updates continuously bring further improvements and optimizations.

Astra Theme 3.0 also Brought a lot of Other Changes

Besides the Customizer speed increase, Astra 3.0 brought even more advancements and functions.

We optimized HTML and CSS significantly reducing the amount of code. The result is that our average page load times were reduced from 0.9 seconds to 0.7 seconds!

The biggest improvement that came with Astra 3.0 was our new Header Footer Builder. This created a completely new experience of visual Header and Footer building with a significant number of available elements and options, different Header and Footer design layers (Above, Primary, and Below), and much more.

With the following major updates, came the completely redesigned customizer UI that was covered by this guide, as well as new controls to duplicate and delete header and footer elements, Google Web Stories, SVG Icons support, Related posts… and there are many more to come.

Free Plugins

We constantly strive to help our users have an amazing website-building experience. You can check some of our free plugins that you can use:

All In One Schema Rich Snippet – you probably heard about schema markup? It’s a code you place on your website which provides additional information to help Search Engines understand what is the content on your pages really about. You can use this plugin to easily implement schema types like Review, Events, Recipes, Article, Products, Services, etc.

Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder Lite – these ultimate addons will boost your Beaver builder with great additional modulus.

Elementor – Header Footer & Blocks Template – using this plugin you can add headers, footers, and blocks anywhere on your website and design these by Elementor without needing any other plugin or addon.

And these are just a few of the free ones. Feel free to also check out some of our premium plugins.

Education

On top of the Astra theme and our products, we are proud to provide great support for both our free and Pro users. Our Blog and extensive Knowledge base cover a massive amount of detailed documentation, articles, and guides for building websites with Astra.

Though our products are simple to use and developed with user-friendliness on our minds, they are continually evolving. That is why we regularly update and expand our Knowledge base.

Next to the docs that will clarify any bump or issue you might encounter with Astra, we also create detailed guides, walkthroughs, and blog articles to make your work easy and help you get the most out of the Astra theme and our other products.

Support & Community

On top of the Astra theme and our products, we are proud to provide great support for both our free and Pro users. Our Blog and extensive knowledge base cover a massive amount of detailed documentation, articles, and guides for building websites with Astra. 

Further, our Support team is available to help you 24/7, all year round with any issues you can’t solve on your own or couldn’t find in our knowledge base or blogs. Just drop us a message here and our support engineers will help you out in no time. 

Last but not least Astra theme is backed by a huge community ready to help and share knowledge at all times. Join our Facebook groups to become a part of Astra Comunity:

• Astra WordPress Theme Community
• Astra and Elementor Users

Astra Pro

We hope that you enjoyed this Astra Theme Walkthrough. As we work on constantly improving our free theme, we know that some of our users require more powerful features, an enhanced list of customization options, and premium support. For this reason, we created Astra Pro Addon. 

Please check the full list of features available with Astra Pro and our comparison with the Astra free theme.

We invite you to visit our official website and find out more about the world of Astra.

Growth and Essential Bundle

Having Astra Pro is a great addition to your theme, but you might also need additional options for your content or a boost in your online sales. Also, if you build websites for your clients, you might be dealing with a number of different requests and preferences.

This is where our Bundles step in. Next to Astra Pro which is included in our bundles, you would be getting additional products to help you expand your business and premium support.

Essential Bundle is a great choice to boost your online business or start the agency or freelancer work. Mini-Growth Bundle gives you a balanced mix with just the right combination of products you would need like:

• Ultimate Addons for Elementor or Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder (you can choose the one you prefer) to expand your preferred Page builder capabilities and help you build amazing website designs
• Premium Starter Templates and
• WP Portfolio plugin.

You can find more details about the Essential Bundle in this article.

Furthermore, our Growth Bundle will boost your traffic (Schema Pro plugin) and your conversions (Convert Pro plugin), while giving you both page builder addons (Ultimate Addons for Elementor AND Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder) and access to our SkillJet Academy. You can find more details about Growth Bundle in this article.

Hosting and Configurations for Better Performance

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 – this is the cheapest and option as it means that your website is sharing server resources with many other websites. For small and simple websites this would be enough in most cases. It’s important to know that your website performance is affected by traffic surges and other resource-intensive processes on other websites on your server and that it will slow down your website too (when it happens). But if your website is growing and you need additional functionality, at some point you will probably need to migrate to some more stable option with more available resources.

• VPS hosting – This is usually the next step. Here you are still sharing the server physically with other website owners, but each you have your Virtual Private Server (VPS). The biggest difference here is that your server has guaranteed allocated resources. This will be enough for most of the smaller and mid-sized websites including even e-commerce websites with moderate traffic. Also, this is the moderate option when it comes to the price;

• Dedicated hosting – Dedicated hosting means that you are renting a whole physical server. This means that you have all server resources available, but at the same time be aware that you are responsible for everything and that you’ll need some server management skills here. This is a more expensive option too, but also the one that can take higher workload and high traffic;

• Cloud hosting – is the service where several computers share and combine their resources. The result is reliable hosting with great performance, and also more resilient (reduced downtime in case of server malfunction). On the other side, often these are ‘unmanaged’ hosting options which means that you are in charge of server management and any other needs you might have.  

• Managed hosting – Usually combines the great hardware (e.g. cloud hosting) together with software setup, scalability, backups, WordPress server optimization, etc.

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, have 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.

Use Starter Templates

What are Starter Templates?

The biggest boost to building great websites quickly is our Starter Templates – a 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.

Astra Theme works great with most major Page Builders but we have dedicated our attention especially to the following four: Gutenberg, Elementor, Beaver Builder, and Brizy… and our Starter Templates are available for each of these builders.

Why Use It?

Starting any project becomes much easier when you have a whole team to help you. Instead of starting from scratch, the Astra team designed a great-looking website for you to use.

You can import the whole website that comes with all needed plugins and dummy content. From there, just add your content instead of the dummy content, and you’re done.

Naturally, if you wish, you can use these designs as a starting point and modify them as you wish. Also, you can import only an individual page (or pages) from any template. This will drastically shorten the time you need to build your websites or develop design concepts. 

How To Start Building Your Website With Astra And Starter Templates?

Once you have the Astra theme installed and activated, navigate to your Plugins menu and click on “Add New” button. Search for “Starter Templates” there – install and activate the plugin.

Once the plugin is activated, you can find it at Dashboard > Appearance > Starter Templates. 

On the upper right corner of the Starter Templates window, you will see a Page Builder selector. Please choose your preferred Page Builder and the Templates library will be filtered accordingly.

At the top, you will see a search bar with additional filtering options. You can search this way or just scroll down and browse the templates library. Each template is represented by the home page cover picture. To see the template pages and details just click on any Template cover.

On a template page, you can select any available page within the template and scroll up and down, or click a “Preview” button to see the live demo site. 

Once you decide which template you would like to use, just click on the “Import Complete Site” button to import all template pages. Also, if you like just one or a few pages, you can import pages individually.

Our templates come with all plugins installed and settings already done. But naturally, once your template is imported, you are free to modify all settings and add, modify or remove any content you want.

In conclusion, 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 Templated.

Other Options: WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, LearnDash, WebStories, Hooks

The Astra theme is integrated with different plugins, thus when these plugins are activated, additional options may appear in the Customizer. Some of these plugins are:

• WooCommerce – if you plan on building an eCommerce website, you can do this easily with WooCommerce. Astra will provide great options for styling your store and products just the way you like them. Find out more about the Customizer options in this article;
• Easy Digital Downloads – if you plan on selling digital products you might decide to use this plugin for your store. Astra provides styling options for Easy Digital Downloads too. Find out more about the Customizer options in this article;
• LearnDash – If you’re planning to build an online learning website, LearnDash is a great solution for this. Find out more about the Customizer options for LearnDash in this article;
• Web Stories – Web Stories are an engaging way to display your website content. You can design stories with a Web Stories editor and show them on your own websites, just as you do on your Social Media profiles. Check out how you can use this plugin in this article.
• Astra Hooks – this plugin will help you add code to different parts of your website – for example, Google Analytics to Google Tag code. Find out more about how to use this plugin with Astra in this article;

WordPress Default Options

You can find a few default WordPress dashboard options available in the Customizer. Of course, these seetings can be made through the Dashboard, but having these options in the Customizer allows you to manage settings without leaving it.

• Menus – you can use this option to create new or edit your existing menus. You can also set which menu is being used for each website location (Menu Locations)
• Widgets – this option is used to manage your website widgets. Keep in mind that with Astra Customizer, you will not see the widget options here as they are located directly within the different options like Header and Footer Builder.
• Homepage Settings – here, you can set which pages you would like to use as your Homepage and Blog / Archive page.

Additional CSS

Though the Astra theme offers a lot of options out-of-the-box, sometimes you might need more. A lot of changes can be done by simply adding some custom CSS code to your website.

To do this, you can use the Additional CSS option in your customizer. Just click on this option and copy your custom CSS code in the space on the left side of the screen like shown in the example here:

The changes will be applied straight away on your Customizer preview on the right side so you can see the result prior to changing your changes.

To remove the effects of Custom CSS, just delete the code you added here.

This is the place where your visitors expect to find some key information like company details, contact information, social media links, or some additional or related content and links.

This is often a great place to add your links to other offerings you might have or put the most important links and call to action buttons to avoid the need of scrolling back to the top. 

Here again, the Astra theme comes with a drag & drop Footer Builder allowing you to build your footer equally easy as your header.

General and Design tabs

General tab is your default view when opening the Footer Builder. Here you have an overview of your footer setup.

On a left side menu, all of your active footer elements will be listed.

Rest of the screen is showing a live preview of your footer and the position of your elements across footer sections in your Visual Footer Builder.

Design tab gives you options of setting the Background Color & Image for the whole footer, as well as adding Padding and Margin.

Visual Footer Builder

Same as with Header, the Visual Footer Builder consists of three separate sections too. 

These three Footer sections are:

• Primary Footer  – the middle section; this is your main footer section.

• Above Footer – the upper section; often this is the place to add your subscription form or call to action buttons

• Below Footer – the lower section; usually Copyright information and come contact or company information are placed here (like address, phone number/e-mail, company registration number etc.)

As with the header sections, each footer section customizations are accessed by clicking on the “cog” icon on the left side of the sections.  

Each section has two tabs:

General tab – Footer

Column – select the number of columns you want to add to this footer section;

Layout – choose the column layout based on the selected number of columns;

Inner Elements Layout – display widgets in the same column Stacked (on top of each other) or Inline (next to each other) 

Width – set the footer content width to Full Width (edge to edge) or to Content Width

Height – set height of this footer section.

Vertical Alignment – vertically align element content across all the columns within this footer section to Top, Middle or Bottom of the section.

Hide on Mobile – hide this header on mobile devices.

Design tab – Footer

Top Border Size (& Color) – add the top border to the footer section by setting the size of your border.

Border Color – Once you set your border size, an additional option will appear (Border Color) for choosing the color of the border;

Background – set this footer background color;

Inner Column Spacing – add space within each column;

Padding – add padding on one or more sides of the footer; 

Margin – add a margin on one or more sides of the header. 

Each footer section can be customized separately for desktop and mobile. You can add different footer elements or change their positions for each viewport.

Footer Elements

You can build your footer the same way as your header. Compared to Header Builder, the Footer Builder offers a somewhat smaller number of elements. You will be able to add the following elements to your footer sections: Footer Menu, Social, HTML, Widget, and Copyright.

Further down, we will show you how to use elements specifically available for the footer and a few of those used also for headers but with slightly different settings. The Rest of the elements are used the same way as with Header Builder.

Primary Menu

Here, you will see the menu items you added to your Footer Menu (Dashboard > Appearance > Menus). 

In the General tab you can set the menu Layout to Inline or Stack and set the menu items Alignment.

The Design tab will allow you to set the Text and Background colors, Menu Font Size, Menu Spacing and Margin.

Social (Footer)

Compared to the Social element used for header, the footer Social element has the additional Alignment option in the General tab 

Copyright

This element allows you to simply add and style your Copyright and it can be used only within the Footer. You can use the following shortcodes here:

• [copyright] 
• 2022 
• [site_title] 
• [theme_author]

The Sidebar option in your Customizer allows you to add sidebars across your entire website by setting Default Layout. Additionally, you can set different options for the following locations:

• Pages
• Blog Posts
• Archives (like Blog Archive for example)

Further, depending on what plugins you have activated, you will be able to set the sidebars for additional pages (e.g. WooCommerce or LearnDash pages).

There are four available sidebar options to be chosen:

• No Sidebar – hide sidebar

• Left Sidebar – position sidebar on the left side of the content

• Right Sidebar – position sidebar on the right side of the content

• Choosing Default on any location will apply the Default Layout sidebar settings.

Sidebar Width sets the percentage of your container area reserved for the sidebar.

To set your Blog page, start by creating and naming a page (Dashboard > Pages > Add New). Then, navigate to Dashboard > Settings > Reading and set this page as your “Posts page”. This will apply the Blog Archive template to this page – that means any previous content on this page will not be visible. This is why we use an empty page for this.

Within this option, you can also modify the number of posts to be shown on each page of your Blog archive (the default value is 10 posts).

Once you set this, you can customize your Blog / Archive page and your Posts using the Astra theme Blog option in the Customizer.

Blog / Archive

Within the General tab, if you wish to change a default Content Width set for your whole website, just select “Custom” and set the custom width specifically for your Blog page. 

You can modify the way the posts are displayed on the Blog page. In the Post Structure and Meta sections, you can set the order of elements in which they are displayed by simply dragging each of them to the desired place in the list.

Also, you can hide any element in the list by clicking on the “eye” icon on it (click the “eye” icon one more time if you decide to have the element displayed again).

The last option, the Post Content, lets you choose if you want to show the Full Content of the posts on the Blog page or only Excerpt.

Available styling options in the Design tab are setting the Archive Title Font Size (the Blog page title) and the Post Title Font Size (title of each of your posts shown on the Blog page).

Single post

A Single post option is used to customize the way your Posts are displayed.

General Tab

Similarly as with Blog / Archive settings, in the General tab you can set the Custom Width for your Posts and modify Structure and Meta.

The last option in the General tab allows you to Enable Related Posts and adjust the settings according to your needs. You can set a custom Title for a related posts section, set the Number of related posts, Grid Column Layout, as well as Posts Query and Structure. You can find more details on related posts in this article.

Design Tab

In the Design tab, you can find options for changing the Post / Page Title Font Size.

These are navigational links which means that the visitor can easily return to any higher-level category simply by clicking on it.

Use the General tab to enable your breadcrumbs by choosing the Header Position (where should breadcrumbs be positioned in your header) or disable them by choosing “None”. In addition, you can disable breadcrumbs on specific pages by activating appropriate options from the list.

Also here you can set a Separator which will be used between the categories, as well as the Alignment.

Styling options for breadcrumbs are located in the Design tab.

This is a place for visitors to meet your brand, your offer or idea, and to be initially delighted and intrigued to explore your website further.

Astra theme comes with a drag & drop Header Builder – a perfect tool for you to create great headers quickly and effortlessly, without any coding. Here you will be able to add and customize your logo, site title, and tag, your header style, menus, buttons, social icons, and much more.

You have full freedom to position elements by just dragging them to any position in the header – as simple as that.

Header Builder – General Tab

General tab is your default view when opening the Header Builder. Here you have an overview of your header setup.

On a left-side menu, all of your active header elements will be listed. Further down, under “Header Types” you can find the transparent header settings.

Rest of the screen is showing a live preview of your header and the position of your elements across header sections.

Transparent Header

Enabling a transparent header will remove the header background color and shift your content to the top of the page underneath the header, creating the transparency effect.

When the transparent header is enabled, it’s advisable to add a hero image (e.g., full-width image or video, sliders, etc.) or use sections without content (e.g., headings or text) positioned on top – this way, you will avoid overlapping the content and the header.

General Tab

To enable transparency, activate the “Enable on Complete Website” option. This will also open additional options to disable transparent header for a specific page or post types.

Enable On – choose to enable transparent header on Desktop, Mobile or both (Desktop+Mobile)

Different Logo for Transparent Header – if your Logo looks good on the standard header, but maybe not so much with a transparent one, you can activate this option and set the different logo to be used for the transparent header.

You can also set the transparent header Logo Width. Depending on the logo you’re using, you might want to add a logo for Retina (higher pixel density) screens which should be at least 2x larger or more. Just click on “Different Logo for Retina Devices” and upload your retina Logo.

Design Tab

Under the Design tab, you’ll find options for styling your Transparent header. You will be able to set the site title, background, menu, submenu, and colors. Also, there are options for setting background overlay and bottom border. The bottom border is by default set to 0px and thus not visible – increasing the border value (1px or more) will make it show on the frontend, and you will also get the option to set the Bottom Border Color.

Keep in mind that these settings are applied only to your Transparent header. If you’re using your regular header on some pages, these settings will not be applied there.

Header Builder – Design

Design tab is used to set your header spacing:

Width sets to total amount of space your header widgets will use:

• Full Width will spread your header widgets from edge to edge of the screen;

• Content Width limits your header widgets to be displayed using your content width – your header background will still be stretching from edge to edge of the screen.

Margin adds space to one or more sides of your header. This will add space to both your header widgets area and background.

Visual Header Builder

The header consists of three separate sections which you can see in the visual header builder area. You can use all three sections to add any element to any position. 

These three sections are:

• Primary Header – this header is the middle section. It is most commonly used for adding your most important elements like Logo, Primary Menu, or Search, Cart, and Account.

• Above Header – this header is the upper section, and it is displayed above Primary Header on your website. It can be used for your secondary elements, like the secondary menu, or elements like social icons, call to action buttons, etc. You can also use HTML code to add for example current discount period, breaking news or some notification for the website visitors. 

• Below Header – this header is the lower section, and it is displayed below Primary Header on your website. The use of this header is the same as the Above Header.

The main purpose of Above and Below Headers is to avoid cluttering the Primary Header. They extend the available area for adding all elements and information you need in your Header, as well as to provide a certain level of prioritization.

You can customize each section by clicking on the “cog” icon on the left side of the sections. 

Each section has two tabs:

General

Height – set height of each header separately.

Design

Bottom Border Size (& Color) – if you need to separate your header from another section or website content you can add bottom border by setting the size of your border. Once you set your border size, additional option will appear (Bottom Border Color) for choosing the color of the border;

Background – set the header background color;

Padding – add padding on one or more sides of the header. This will add space between the header section edges and content;

Margin – add margin on one or more sides of the header. This will add space between that header and another website areas (other headers, page/post content, screen edges, etc.);

Each header can be customized separately for desktop and mobile and can have different elements added for each view. The position of elements can also be changed.

Off Canvas section

The Off Canvas section is used to edit your tablet/mobile menu. This menu is activated by clicking on the Toggle Button in the mobile menu (also called “hamburger” menu). 

To edit this menu, switch to tablet or mobile viewport editing. You can add elements to this menu and set their order the same way you edit other header sections. Clicking on the “cog” icon will open the following tabs:

General

Header Type – set Off Canvas type to Flyout (menu flying in from right or left side of a screen), Full-Screen or Dropdown;

Dropdown Target – choose if you want your sub-menus to open by clicking on the down-arrow icon (Icon) or by clicking to a whole menu item (Link)

Content Alignment – align the Off Canvas section widgets to Left, Centar or Right;

Design

Inner Element Spacing – adding space between the elements;

Background – set the background color.

Header Element

Site Identity & Logo

This is your Site Identity & Logo element (previously named “Logo“). In the General tab, you can add your Logo, set Logo width, and add a Different Logo for Retina devices.

Using this element, next to Logo, you can set your Site Title, Site Tagline, and your Site Icon (favicon). This information is also displayed on the top of your website tab in your browser.

The Design tab is used if you want to add some Margin to this element.

Primary Menu

Here, you will find menu items added to your Primary Menu (Dashboard > Appearance > Menus). 

The General tab provides you with several Submenu options: submenu Width, Container Animation (the animation used when expanding a submenu), Item Divider (adds or removes divider between submenu items).

You can also decide if to set your menu items to Stack on Mobile. This is the most common setup for mobile menus – the menu items will be stacked one on top of the other.

The Design tab will allow you to set Menu Hover Style, style your Submenu Container, set the Text and Background Colors, Menu Font, Manu Spacing, and Margin.

Search

Adding this element will add a search function to your header. You can set the Icon Size, Icon Color and Margin.

Social (Header)

You can add your social media icons using this element. You can manage your social media icons using the General tab – add, choose the icon or remove them. 

The Design tab holds the options for styling the icons.

Button

This is used for adding a custom button to your header. Add the Text, Link and style (Design tab) the button here.

Secondary Menu

You can add another (secondary) menu to your header if you need it. You can also use this if you wish to split your primary menu into two separate menus – for example, if you want to create a header with a centrally positioned Logo, with your menu items next to it on the left and right sides.

You can customize this menu the same way as the Primary Menu.

HTML

Use this element to add HTML code or shortcodes.

Widget

This is used to add any of the website widgets (Dashboard > Appearance > Widgets) to your header.

Toggle Button

Toggle Button (also known as hamburger icon or button) is used to expand your tablet/mobile menu. Thus, this element is only available on tablet or mobile views. 

The General tab will enable you to choose the button Icon and Icon Size, add Menu Label (text next to the icon) if you need it, and the Toggle Button Style. 

The styling options are located in the Design tab: Icon Color, Background Color, Border Radius and Margin.

Account

If you have some plugins like LearnDash or WooCommerce active, you can add the user account shortcut using this element.

Cart

This will add a Cart icon (WooCommerce) to your header. Next, set if Cart Title should be displayed as well, or only the cart icon, and whether you want to display a Cart Total too (General tab). You can also style your cart and your cart tray (Design tab).

Typography

Maybe sometimes you wouldn’t even notice, but using great fonts on a website really makes a huge difference. You can decide here what fonts would you like to use for different elements, font sizes, weight, etc. If you wish to learn more about choosing the right font check this article.

Base Typography 

Let’s start here with choosing a font Family for your website. This should be the dominant family for your website (though you can use more than one on your website).

If you don’t already have a predetermined font, spend some time going through fonts and choosing the right one. You can do this by clicking on the Family dropdown menu and scrolling down the font list or typing the name in the search field.

Selection is wide, as next to the System fonts you can choose any of Google Fonts, the largest directory of free and open-source web fonts. The list can be expanded even further with our plugins:

• Custom Adobe Fonts (Typekit) to embed Adobe fonts;
• Custom Fonts will allow you to use any custom fonts that you need – just upload the font file and it will be added to the font list.

Now, once you selected your font family, let us move to specifics. Selecting all the Variants will save you time and clicks – if you choose for example the “700 Italic” variant, any time you mark your text as italic, it will automatically get the 700 weight.

Next, set the default text Size (in px), Weight and if you need it Text transformation (e.g. capitalizing every word on your website).

The last two options will influence how much space will your text take. Line height will set the height of each row of text, while Paragraph Margin Bottom will determine the space added to the bottom of each paragraph. You can set these values by typing in the size value or by moving the slider left and right. 

Headings

Headings help your website visitors understand the importance of different page or post sections. WordPress uses headings from H1 to H6. 

The most important heading on each page or post is H1, and it should provide search engines with the information about that page or post content (what’s it all about). Thus, there should be only one of these on each post or page. 

Other headings can be used as needed. The higher the heading number, the less important it is (so the H6 if used, marks the least important content).

Here, you can set almost all of the options as in Base Typography for each header separately, giving them a specific and accented look.

Colors

Not that you have your typography set, it’s time to give it some color. Here you can set your color scheme to make it appealing and set the mood. Used the right way, the colors tell users a lot about the type of website they are viewing and about the brand itself. 

We will explain what each color type does:

Text Color – Color for the body text (all of your regular text) and descriptions on the website;

Theme Color – Color for all theme elements like buttons, selected text background color, etc.;

Link Color – Color for all text that has link added to it;

Link Hover Color – Color for all text that has link added to it when being hovered over with the pointer (hover color).

To change any color, click on the colored circle next to the color type name. You will be able to visually choose your color by clicking on the color picker and setting the opacity (transparency) if you need it. Alternatively, you can add the color value in HEX, HSL, or RGB formats. 

To remove the changes and revert the color to a default color, click on the “Clear” button or click on the “back to default” icon.

Here, you also have the option to set the background for the whole website:

Background – You have three options to choose from: Color, Gradient, or Image. Whichever option you choose, it will be applied as a background to the body on the entire site.

You can also set both color and image at the same time – in this case, make sure to adjust the opacity (less than 100%) of the color to make the image visible, as the color will be used as an overlay.

You can find more details about color and background settings in this article.

Container

Now it’s time to make some settings for the content of your website. A container is the area where all of your content is being displayed on each page or post. 

The content area and the sidebar are parts of the container. The content area is technically called the primary container, whereas the sidebar is the secondary container.

Content Width 

This value will set the maximum width of your container. This will define how much space will your content and sidebars (if you set these) take on pages and posts.

Layout

By setting the container layout, you will be choosing how your content, sidebar and widgets, header, footer and website background come together on your website. You have 4 types of Container layouts:

• Boxed – this layout will display individual containers and widgets appear in boxes. This leaves space on all sides around each box – thus, you will be able to see the website background.
• Content Boxed – with this, only your content appears in the boxed format, while sidebar and widgets are displayed on a plain background.
• Full Width / Contained – this will set your content and sidebar in a single container. This container will display in a container width, leaving the space on the left and right side.
• Full Width / Stretched – using this layout, your content and sidebar will be displayed in a single container, stretched from edge to edge of your screen.

Astra theme allows you to set a different layout throughout the website, depending on your needs:

Layout – the layout selected here will be a Default layout for the whole website.  Remaining layout option will have this layout selected automatically. You can change layout for following post types if needed:

Page Layout – for pages

Blog Post Layout – for blog archive and single blog post pages

Archives Layout – all archives

Further, depending on other plugins you might be using on your website, you will find the options to set the layout for their dedicated pages, for example, WooCommerce Layout or LearnDash Layout.

Buttons

The last global option is used for setting default look for website buttons. We will make a short overview of available options and what they are used for:

Text Color – set the normal & hover color of the button text;

Background Color – set the normal & hover color of the button (background) color;

Border Width – if you wish to add border to your buttons, just set the border width here;

Border Color – set the normal & hover color of the button border;

Border Radius – adding radius will make your buttons more rounded; as you increase the radius value your buttons will change shape from rectangle towards circle.

Button font – typography settings available here will be applied only on button text.

Padding – this will add an inner padding of your button; larger padding will make your button larger

Final remarks for Global settings:

• Option with a “responsive editing” icon next to it can be separately edited for desktop, tablet, and mobile. Applying changes in each view will change the settings only for the currently active view. On the other side, changing settings for the options without a “responsive editing” icon will apply the same changes to all views.

• Please have in mind that some global options will not be applied to your content as they might get replaced by settings you make in the Page builder. This will depend on your choice of Page Builder to use for your website.