A Fast Site Starts with the Right Foundation.
When it comes to building a high-performing website, the theme you choose matters. It’s easy to focus on flashy designs or features, but none of that works well if your site is slow or difficult to manage.
At Central Coast Websites, we use the Astra Theme for most of our builds and for good reason. It’s one of the fastest, most lightweight themes available for WordPress, and it integrates seamlessly with the page builders we use every day, like Elementor and Beaver Builder.
A fast, flexible theme like Astra gives us a strong foundation to build on. Whether we’re creating a service-based site, a landing page, or a large-scale business website, Astra helps us keep things fast, clean, and easy to maintain.
In this post, we’ll explain why we choose Astra, how it works with the tools we use, and what makes it a reliable choice for modern websites. We’ll also clarify a common point of confusion, the difference between a theme and a page builder, to help you understand how everything fits together behind the scenes.
What’s the Difference Between a Theme and a Builder?
We build all of our websites using a combination of a trusted theme and a page builder. While some people assume that using a page builder like Elementor or Beaver Builder means you don’t need a theme, that’s not the case.
The theme provides the structural framework of the website including your header, footer, page templates, and overall layout settings. The page builder handles the content inside each page, the rows, columns, buttons, images, and text you interact with.
Even though clients don’t always see the theme directly, it plays a critical role behind the scenes. We use Astra because it’s fast, builder-friendly, and gives us the flexibility to build professional sites without unnecessary clutter or restrictions.
A theme is your site’s foundation.
It controls the overall structure of your website; things like your header, footer, page templates, typography defaults, and layout settings. Astra, for example, gives us a clean, fast-loading framework to work from. It handles the bits you don’t see changing from page to page, like your logo area, navigation, and global styles.
A page builder is your visual editor.
Elementor or Beaver Builder handles what goes inside the pages—your content blocks, columns, buttons, images, and other visual elements. It’s where we design the layout and content of each individual page.
You can think of it this way:
- The theme gives your site its bones.
- The builder adds the personality and detail to each page.
The best results happen when the two work together. Astra is designed to be builder-friendly, which means no layout clashes, no unnecessary bloat, and complete control over how each section of the site looks and behaves.
Why We Use Astra: The Pros
We’ve tested a lot of WordPress themes over the years, and Astra stands out for its speed, flexibility, and how well it works with the standard tools we use. It’s the theme we trust to deliver reliable performance across a wide range of website types.
Fast-loading out of the box
Astra is one of the fastest themes available for WordPress. It’s lightweight, doesn’t load unnecessary scripts, and is optimised for performance straight away. This gives us a strong head start when it comes to meeting Google’s Core Web Vitals and creating a smooth experience for users.
Built for Page Builders
Astra was made to work with page builders like Elementor and Beaver Builder. It offers layout controls and blank canvas options that allow us to design pages without being restricted by the theme’s default styling. No fighting with the theme to get the layout we want.
Easy to Customise
Astra gives us plenty of control over global settings like fonts, colours, container widths, and header layouts, all through the WordPress Customiser. We can create a consistent, professional look without custom coding, and clients can manage basic updates confidently.
SEO Friendly
Astra is built with clean code and includes basic schema markup, helping search engines better understand your site structure. Combined with proper on-page SEO, it gives your content the best chance of ranking well.
Reliable and Well Supported
Astra has a huge user base, regular updates, and excellent documentation. Whether we’re building a simple brochure site or something more complex, we know we’re working with a product that’s stable and well maintained.
When Astra Might Not Be the Right Fit .
While Astra suits the majority of projects we take on, there are some situations where a different theme may be more appropriate.
In rare cases, highly specialised websites that require a very specific design system or industry-specific functionality might call for a custom-built theme or a more tailored framework. For example, large eCommerce builds with unique product filtering needs, or sites with deep third-party platform integration, may benefit from a different setup, though Astra still handles many of these scenarios well when paired with the right tools.
We also maintain older sites that were built on themes like Enfold, which was more common in previous years. While Enfold was once a popular choice, it’s no longer our go-to. We now favour Astra for its speed, cleaner codebase, and compatibility with modern builders.
As our process continues to evolve, Astra remains the theme we trust for long-term performance, flexibility, and maintainability.
Building Better Websites Starts with the Right Theme.
After building and managing countless websites across different industries, we’ve learned that the tools you choose behind the scenes can make all the difference, not just for performance, but for long-term ease of use, maintenance, and scalability. While design trends shift and technology evolves, our approach stays the same: we prioritise clean code, fast load times, and a structure that empowers our clients to manage their own sites confidently, without being locked into complex systems.
Astra fits naturally into that approach. It’s not about ticking boxes or chasing features, it’s about having a reliable framework that supports the way we build. Our focus is always on delivering websites that look great, work hard, and make life easier for the people using them.
If you’re exploring your next website project and want something that’s fast, future-proof, and easy to manage, we’re happy to talk through what’s possible. Not just talk; practical advice and solutions that work.
