What's New with Astra

Hey everyone 👋

This release is all about smoothing out rough edges. Sticky headers behave themselves again, Post Filters stopped showing blank pages, and a stubborn “update available” notice is finally gone. There’s also a security hardening fix for Site Builder that makes this one worth installing sooner rather than later.

Let’s get into it.

🔧 Better than before

• Site Builder output is more tightly escaped. The author name shown in Advanced Headers archive titles is now hardened against unexpected markup.

🐛 Squashed

• Site Builder layouts with custom code are locked down properly. Code-editor layouts are now restricted to admins, and snippets that aren’t meant to run are sanitized before display. This prevents stored scripts from reaching your site’s front end. Patched.
• WPML users: your Customizer text stays in the right language. Header and footer HTML, button text, and similar strings could get permanently saved in the wrong language during plugin updates. Fixed.
• That lingering “update available” notice is gone. After updating from an older version, Astra Pro could still offer you the version you’d just installed. Cleared.
• SVG logos survive the shrink effect. Enabling “Enable Shrink Effect” on the Sticky Header made SVG logos vanish. They stay put now.
• Sticky headers stopped drifting left. With the Max Width site layout, the Primary Header shifted left on scroll when a margin was set, and the Above/Below Header did the same with Scroll or Fade animations. Both stay centered now.
• Creating an Overlay Template no longer crashes the Block Editor. Starting a new Overlay Template from a Navigation block’s settings threw an “astra-custom-layout plugin has encountered an error” message. Squashed.
• One popup is enough. On mobile product category pages, the WooCommerce Product Filters block opened a second popup inside the Off-Canvas filter flyout. It doesn’t anymore.
• Live Search plays by HTML rules. The Header Cover search style rendered the same id twice on the page when used with the Header/Footer Builder. Fixed, and your markup validates again.
• The Pagination spacing control stopped hiding. Turning off the Blog Pro module made the Blog / Archive “Pagination” spacing setting disappear from the Customizer. It’s back where it belongs.
• Post Filters show your custom templates now. Clicking a category tab that used a custom Site Builder template showed a blank content area. Those tabs now load the page directly so your template renders in full.

We recommend updating as soon as you can.

As always, support is one click away if anything feels off.

— Team Astra

Hey everyone 👋

This one is all about polish. Your mobile logo now loads a lighter, right-sized image, and we cleaned up a batch of quirks across WPML sites, WooCommerce shops, search, and the header builder.

Let’s get into it.

🔧 Better than before

• Mobile pages load faster. If you use a different logo for mobile, Astra now serves a right-sized image variant instead of the full-size original. Smaller download, better LCP score, quicker first paint on phones.

🐛 Squashed

• Customizer text no longer gets saved in the wrong language on WPML sites. Strings like header and footer HTML or button text were being permanently overwritten with a translation whenever the theme updated or settings were saved. Your original text stays put now.
• The search form outputs valid HTML again when Live Search is on. The autocomplete attribute was being escaped as a whole string instead of just its value, producing invalid markup. Fixed.
• Product search results keep their own layout. Shop page settings for sidebar, container, title, header, and footer were leaking onto the WooCommerce product search results page. They no longer override it.
• Rotating a tablet no longer breaks the desktop header. On slow-loading pages, mobile menu styles could briefly stick to the desktop header after resizing or rotating across the header breakpoint. Gone.
• The Read More button shows up on search results again. It went missing on posts listed after a Beaver Builder page containing a Posts module. Back where it belongs.
• The Account element in the Header Builder shows your assigned menu. If the WooCommerce account menu was enabled and WooCommerce was later deactivated, the element rendered an empty menu instead of falling back to your Account Menu. Squashed.
• Dismissed admin notices stay dismissed. Some notices could occasionally reappear after you closed them. Not anymore.

Update when you get a chance.

As always, support is one click away if anything feels off.

— Team Astra

Hey everyone 👋

This one is all about the small things that make a site feel off: a checkout summary that wouldn’t show up, a wp-admin link leaking to search engines, and a mega menu failing HTML validation. All handled.

Let’s get into it.

🔧 Better than before

• Subscription prices no longer crowd the quantity in Modern Checkout. If you sell with WooCommerce Subscriptions, the order review table now puts proper spacing between the product quantity and the recurring price, so they read as two things instead of one jumble.

🐛 Squashed

• The mobile order summary in Modern Checkout no longer shows up empty. When certain plugins like WooCommerce Amazon Pay added their own markup to the checkout page, the collapsible summary stayed blank and shoppers couldn’t see what they were buying. Fixed.
• Your wp-admin edit links are no longer visible to search engines. Blog Pro and WooCommerce pages were including the post edit URL in public page code, even for logged-out visitors. Search engines were finding those wp-admin links and flagging them as inaccessible in Search Console. Gone.
• Full-width mega menus now output valid HTML. The Full and Full Stretched layouts were leaving a wrapper element unclosed, which failed W3C validation on any page using them. Closed and clean.
• The Post Filter plays nicely with “All” again. With Blog Pro’s Layout 1 and the Post Title Area enabled, clicking “All” left the banner and title area stuck on the last filter instead of resetting. It resets properly now.
• Turning off Site Builder no longer leads to a dead end. Its tab in the Astra dashboard used to throw an access denied error when the module was disabled. Now the tab is simply grayed out with a tooltip explaining why.

Update when you get a chance.

As always, support is one click away if anything feels off.

— Team Astra Pro

Hey everyone 👋

If you updated to 4.13.7 and your Elementor theme colors suddenly snapped back to the Customizer defaults, this one is for you. We tracked it down to a change we made in that release. It is fixed.

Let’s get into it.

🐛 Squashed

• Theme palette colors you picked in the Elementor editor no longer revert to the Customizer default. After updating to 4.13.7, choosing an Astra palette color on a widget would look right until you saved or reloaded, then it would flip back. Astra was not handing its palette colors to Elementor properly. Squashed.

We recommend updating as soon as you can.

As always, support is one click away if anything feels off.

— Team Astra

Hey everyone 👋

No big features this time, just a cleanup pass. We went after the small stuff that quietly gets in the way: a checkout blocker with Stripe, shortcodes disappearing from your header, fonts refusing to load on multilingual sites, and a few visual rough edges.

Let’s get into it.

🔧 Better than before

• Subscription prices no longer crowd the quantity at checkout. If you sell with WooCommerce Subscriptions, the order review table now puts proper breathing room between the product quantity and the recurring price, so they read as two things instead of one jumble.
• Social icon links are smarter about what you paste in. Phone, Email, and WhatsApp icons used to blindly add tel:, mailto:, or the WhatsApp prefix, even when your value already had one, producing broken double-prefixed links. Now Astra checks first and only adds what’s missing.

🐛 Squashed

• Shortcodes work again in the Header/Footer Builder HTML element. Sanitization was stripping them out, including shortcodes placed inside link href attributes, so dynamic content simply vanished from your header or footer. Restored.
• Guest checkout no longer breaks when you have an Email social icon. The icon was outputting a duplicate id="email" on the page, which confused the WooCommerce Checkout block and Stripe into failing for guests. One hidden HTML attribute, one very real lost sale. Fixed.
• “Load Google Fonts Locally” now works on multi-domain setups. On sites serving several domains from one install, like WPML’s “different domains per language,” fonts loaded from the wrong origin and got blocked by the browser. Local font URLs are now root-relative, so every domain fetches fonts from its own address.
• Desktop dropdown menus stay open when they should. With “Dropdown Target: Link” mode active, clicking a parent menu item that had children would slam the dropdown shut instead of following the link. It behaves now.
• Patched a PHP error on the Elementor globals endpoint. An edge case where WordPress returned an error object instead of data could trigger a PHP error behind the scenes. Handled gracefully now.

Update when you get a chance.

As always, support is one click away if anything feels off.

— Team Astra

Hey everyone 👋

This one’s a quick follow-up to 4.13.5. Two fixes: one restores shortcode output in the Header/Footer Builder HTML element to the way it’s always worked, and one stops body text from disappearing on PHP 8. Small release, worth grabbing.

Let’s get into it.

🐛 Squashed

• Shortcodes in the HTML element behave like they used to. A change in 4.13.5 stripped form elements, style tags, and data attributes from shortcode output in the Header/Footer Builder HTML element. That broke forms and custom markup, so we’ve reverted it.
• Body text no longer renders at 0px on PHP 8. When the stored desktop font size was the integer 0, a loose comparison caused the body font size to come out as 0px/0% on PHP 8.0 and up. PHP 7.x quietly masked the bug. Fixed properly now.

Update when you get a chance.

As always, support is one click away if anything feels off.

— Team Astra

Hey everyone 👋

This one’s all about polish. We tracked down a handful of layout glitches, PHP notices, and menu quirks that have been quietly getting in the way. Nothing flashy, just your site behaving the way it should.

Let’s get into it.

🐛 Squashed

• No more PHP notice when WooCommerce is sitting idle. On WordPress 6.9.1 and up, a notice could fire when the flexslider script was queued up, but WooCommerce wasn’t active yet. Gone.
• WooCommerce shop pages stop jumping around on load. The filter and sort toolbar used to flash over the product grid for a moment before snapping into place. It now lands where it belongs from the start.
• Sticky header submenus stay where they should. When a wide logo pushed the header taller than its configured height, dropdown menus could appear with a negative offset and sit in the wrong spot. Fixed.
• Mega Menu padding actually sticks now. Custom padding set in the editor wasn’t applying when “Open Mega Menu On” was set to Hover. A CSS conflict was letting the default override your settings. Your spacing wins now.
• Infinite Scroll no longer breaks custom archive templates. On Custom Post Type archives using a Site Builder template, Infinite Scroll could throw a JavaScript error because it assumed the #main element was always present. It handles those layouts gracefully now.

Update when you get a chance.

As always, support is one click away if anything feels off.

— Team Astra

Hey everyone 👋

No big new toys this time. Just a solid maintenance release that clears out a stack of annoying edge cases. We tracked down a shortcode bug that’s been lurking since v4.11.11, smoothed out the Customizer, tightened up white-label mode, and made the navigation easier to tap. If you’ve hit any of these, this update is for you.

Let’s get into it.

🔧 Better than before

• Submenu dropdown arrows are easier to tap. We bumped up the touch target size on navigation dropdown arrows, so they’re simpler to hit on phones and tablets — and now WCAG 2.5.5 compliant.

🐛 Squashed

• Shortcodes inside link URLs work again. If you put a shortcode in an href inside a Header/Footer Builder HTML element, it was getting stripped before it could run. A regression that snuck in back in v4.11.11. Fixed.
• White-label sites stay truly white-labeled. The support widget and AI Assistant were still showing up in the dashboard even with white label turned on, leaking Astra branding to your clients. They’re now hidden as expected.
• No more console warnings in the block editor on WordPress 7.0. Editor stylesheets were throwing “added to iframe incorrectly” warnings. Cleaned up.
• The block editor no longer crashes on cross-origin setups. On sites where the editor canvas loads from a different origin, the editor was hitting a SecurityError. We wrapped those iframe accesses safely, so it loads without complaint.
• The page no longer jumps to the top when you close the cart drawer. Closing the cart flyout was bouncing your scroll position back up to the top. It now stays right where you were.
• WooCommerce stops flooding your error log. A related-products call was passing the wrong data type, spamming the log on store pages. Fixed at the source.
• MCP global palette tool reads colors correctly. The astra-update-global-palette tool schema had the wrong types for colors and presets, so AI-driven palette changes could misfire. Corrected.
• Correct plugin icon for Cart Abandonment Recovery. The “Extend Your Website” dashboard section was showing the wrong icon. Fixed.
• The Customizer color picker stays open while you scroll. Dragging the panel scrollbar was snapping the color picker shut mid-edit. It behaves now.
• Social icons are labeled correctly. Vimeo, Twitter, YouTube, WhatsApp, Snapchat, and several other brand icons had mismatched labels in the SVG icon picker. All sorted.

We think you’ll like this one. Update when you’re ready.

As always, support is one click away if anything feels off.

— Team Astra

Hey everyone 👋

This one is mostly maintenance. We squashed a few bugs that were quietly causing trouble on specific setups, fixed a WooCommerce pricing edge case, and added license status notices so you’re never caught off guard by an expiring subscription.

Let’s get into it.

🔧 Better than before

• Third-party plugins can now target individual WooCommerce tabs with CSS. Accordion and Distributed tab layouts now output a unique {key}_tab class on each tab wrapper, making it straightforward for plugins like WooCommerce Germanized to show or hide specific tabs.

🐛 Squashed

• WooCommerce sale percentage was off on some products. Locale-formatted price strings weren’t being normalized before the math ran on PHP 8.0+, so percentage discounts could be calculated incorrectly.
• Sticky header hover color now takes priority over the active link color. When a menu item was the current page, its active color was permanently overriding the hover color in the sticky header. They no longer conflict.
• PHP warning on custom post type archives is resolved. get_query_var('post_type') returning an array instead of a string was triggering a warning on CPT archive pages.
• Fatal error on FTP-based file systems is gone. A missing credentials check in the filesystem helpers caused a hard crash for sites running on FTP hosts.
• Customizer no longer crashes when SVG icons haven’t finished loading. A TypeError was thrown when icons were still loading, and a control tried to read them. Squashed.

Update when you get a chance.

As always, support is one click away if anything feels off.

— Team Astra