Best WordPress Magazine Themes: for Blog and News Websites

When it comes to magazine and news websites, WordPress is top of the bill.

Well-known news sites like The New York Times, TechCrunch, CNN,Reuters,Mozilla’s Blog,and many others useWordPress as their platform of choice, highlighting just how scalable WordPress blogs can be.

Choosing theperfect WordPress theme for your magazine website or news blog can be trickier than you’d think. As a publisher you’ll be looking to showcase a large amount of content on a single screen, whilst at the same time wanting your content to be accessible and look attractive to generate user engagement.

Best WordPress Magazine Themes

To help you out we’ve prepared a list of the top WordPress magazine themes on ThemeForest. This list has been updated and refreshed since its initial publication, so dig in and see what’s new!

1.Barcelona

Barcelona is a clean-cut magazine theme with sharp edges, bold whitespace, and high contrast (which is excellent for readers with vision impairment). It boasts “eleven different page modules with six different featured post styles”–check out the demos to see them in action.

2.BoomBox

Billed as the “all-purpose viral magazine theme” BoomBox really is high-octane crammed with features for your pop cult website. Publish news stories, listicles, quizzes, then push them through the usual social sharing culprits–utilize trending, reactions, and voting systems. Phew.

3.Authentic

Light and classic, Authentic issuited for lifestyle bloggers and magazines. And one particularly appealing point is their level of support (get a response to your support question within thirty minutes, during working hours).

4.Redwood

Redwood is a responsive WordPress theme that features a slider with three promo boxes at the top, perfect for showcasing different categories of your magazine. It also comes with five different blog layouts, including full width version of each layout and five different post formats suitable for video posts, gallery posts, music posts and standard posts.

It also comes with custom widgets for Facebook and Instagram. Plus, profile and social widgets. Easy customization options are included as well, which allow you to change your site’s colors (and branding) with a click of a button.

5. The Voux

The Voux touts itself as a stylish, professional magazine WordPress theme that’s simultaneously comprehensive and lightweight. The theme is responsive and retina ready, meaning it will look beautiful no matter what devices your visitors use to view your content.

Some of this theme’s features include striking highlighted images which help draw your readers in, infinite scroll, the ability to share your posts on social media built into the theme, and so much more. To top it all off, The Voux comes with Visual Composer which allows you to completely customize the look and feel of your pages.

6. Newstube

NewsTube is a clean and well-organized theme perfect for video oriented sites. It is fully responsive, retina ready, includes flexible theme layouts, extensive theme options, and supports videos from many popular sites including Youtube, Vimeo and Daily Motion.

With this video theme, you can submit a video from the front end, create great video channels and playlists, or import YouTube Videos and Channels to your website.

7. Flex Mag

Flex Mag features a mobile first design which gives your readers the option to browse through the articles sorted by featured or latest posts via secondary navigation. The theme is packed with features which include a custom Fly-Out Navigation, custom scoreboard, auto-load posts, four different preset skins, nine different Featured Posts options, eight different article templates, 700+ Google Fonts, integration with WooCommerce and bbPress, and so much more.

This theme is the perfect combination of power and simplicity in a WordPress news and magazine theme, giving you plenty of options and flexibility to customize your site without being totally overwhelming.

8. Bimber

Bimber is the perfect theme if you want to create a site similar to BuzzFeed. Bimber is responsive, SEO optimized, compatible with SEO plugins, optimized for Google PageSpeed and comes with support for microdata and rich snippets as well as several ad widgets.

What’s more, the theme can be easily modified via WordPress customizer and comes with a child theme which allows you to safely modify the theme without worrying about losing your changes with the next theme update. On top of that, it comes with one-click installable demos to get your site up and running as quickly as possible.

9. Herald

Herald is a professional WordPress theme crafted especially for news and magazine sites. It offers a high level of customization with more than 500 variations for your article listing layouts, as well as many options to suit your needs with no coding knowledge required.

Herald integrates with WooCommerce and bbPress and it even allows your readers to leave a rating on your services or products. It’s optimized for speed and ensures your website will load fast. And it supports a wide variety of image sizes to make sure your images always look great.

10. Goodlife

Goodlife comes with seven different layouts to choose from depending on what kind of site you want to create. All of the homepage layouts are responsive and include three different header styles and smart ad areas.

The theme is bundled with several different plugins such as Visual Composer, Viral Quiz Builder, Maintenance Pro, Essential Grid and Rankie, which give additional interactive features and the ability to create unique layouts. On top of that, Goodlife is SEO and speed optimized with you plenty of customization options.

11. Chirps

With 13 different article layouts, 14 unique page designs, and the option to create colorful rows and columns, Chirps truly helps you stand out from the crowd. Every element can be individually customized via a page builder.

This theme includes multiple header layouts, Google Fonts, title area overlays, the ability to feature review articles, and much more. Chirps is fully SEO optimized and built with speed in mind.

12. Falive

Lifestyle, fashion, and creative bloggers will appreciate Falive’s clean and streamlined layout. Falive allows you to customize colors, fonts, padding, header layouts, and more with WordPress customizer.

Choose between a full-width or a boxed layout. Or optionally, add a sidebar, add related posts inside individual posts, and set up a recommended post to display as a user scrolls down.Falive’s setup simplicity allows you to spend more time on creating engaging content.

13. Jay

Jay is a responsive magazine theme with a clean and modern look, featuring eight different layouts, including a parallax option. The homepage features a large image which is perfect for welcoming your site’s visitors with a custom message.

Take advantage of multiple layouts and advanced design options to create a visually impressive magazine website. Other features include shortcodes, a post author section, related posts section, infinite scrolling, custom Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, and Dribble widgets, and much more.

14. Bitz

If your website relies on publishing the most up-to-date news, look no further than Bitz. With built-in functionality for custom timing, your readers will know your website is the go-to place for the most recent news.

Pair that with a review functionality with rich snippets with a powerful front-end and back-end editor which lets you customize any aspect of your website (and see the changes as you make them) and you have a truly powerful theme on your hands.

Bits also supports attractive article labels, SEO, and has WooCommerce integration.

15. Examiner

Examiner was designed to be flexible, user-friendly, with plenty of customization options while still being easy to setup and use. The theme features multiple layout options, a review system, and 24 custom widget areas which allow you to create a truly unique and interesting layout.

The Examiner WordPress magazine theme is the perfect theme for publishers and bloggers who want to share their passion with the world, but don’t have the time or resources to build something from scratch.

16. Master

Master is a responsive magazine theme that is not only modern and elegant but also features one-click install and setup. With 10 ready-to-use demos, the theme is designed to get your website up and running as quickly as possible.

Master offers five different blog layouts, three slider designs, give different ways to present your categories, a drag and drop page builder, multi-lingual support and much more.To top it all off, Master comes with complete online documentation full of screenshots and video tutorials to help you setup your site.

17. Voyager

Voyager offers a clean and minimal design, suitable for a lifestyle, fashion, or travel blog and/or a portfolio site. With five different homepage designs, the theme can easily adapt to various niches by putting the focus on your content.

Voyager offers fully responsive design, integration with WooCommerce, as well as a built in pop up form so you can easily convert your visitors into subscribers. Voyager theme is the perfect choice for anyone whose primary goal is to grow their email list.

18. Metz

Metz is a fashion-oriented editorial magazine theme that features an elegant and clean design with carefully selected typography that is sure to appeal to a female audience.

The theme’s top features include a mobile friendly, responsive design, a sleek slider that can be used in three different positions, support for WooCommerce, five different layout options, four different header views, as well as 13 custom widgets.

19. Magzilla

Magzilla is a feature-rich theme suitable for news sites, magazines, and blogs alike. It’s a fully responsive, flexible, and modern WordPress theme designed to showcase your content in a clean, minimal, and fashionable way.

This theme lets you choose from unlimited colors, unlimited page templates, as well as from a slew of other options. On top of that, the theme comes with multi-lingual and SEO support, Visual Composer, and thorough documentation to guide you through the setup process.

20.Matador

Matador is a clean and stylish magazine theme that offers several different layouts ranging from traditional to masonry to slider-focused. It supports responsive design, includes preset color schemes and shortcodes, with plenty of other features to get you started quickly.

And if you want to customize your site and make it your own, then the extensive customization options and 20 different widget areas, will allow you to create a truly unique design.

21. Read & Digest

With 14 different homepage layouts, four slider types, a fully responsive design, and bold typography, Read & Digest is everything you need in a theme to create a visually appealing magazine or news website.

The included comprehensive options panel lets you easily tweak any option in an intuitive manner and allows you to give your website your own personal touch. Other notable features include integration with WooCommerce, Contact Form 7, and a child theme so you can safely change theme files at any time.

22. Soledad

Soledad is a multi-concept blog and magazine theme with over 200 slider and blog layout combinations, three sidebar layout styles, five article layout styles, and six different layouts, giving you a wide range of possibilities to create a unique and stunning design.

This theme also comes with the ability to have video backgrounds as well as WooCommerce support and plenty of customization options, which are sure to please even the most demanding website owner.

23. Paperback

Paperback is a magazine-style theme that allows you to quickly and easily create beautiful, immersive content with images, galleries, video, audio, and more.Paperback is fully responsive and customizable. It’s compatible with many popular plugins including Jetpack and Shortcodes Ultimate.

The theme offers multiple homepage templates, content discovery features, premium Typekit typography, and several built-in color schemes, which you can use as-is or as a starting point for your own splash of color.

Get your magazine website, news driven site, or professional blog setup quickly with this robust WordPress theme. And get to publishing beautiful, engaging content.

Magazine & News Sites Best Practices

Creating a visually appealing magazine or news site is no easy task. Aside from making sure the theme follows the latest best practices, there are three main things you need to keep in mind when choosing a theme for your magazine website:

1. Your content needs to be front and center and easy to read on all devices, including assistive technologies.
2. Content demands to be presented in a visually appealing way with striking imagery that will draw your visitors in.
3. The design should be well organized and structured, rather than feel busy and overwhelming.

Once you’ve chosen a theme that fits the above requirements and gives you the features you need, your next step is properly installing and setting up your new magazine WordPress theme. From there, the sky’s the limit.

Choose the Best WordPress Magazine Theme

With so many WordPress themes available, and the complexity of magazine and news sites, deciding on the best theme for your website may take some consideration.

Choose a theme that fits your branding needs, showcases your content in a style that matches your design goals, and that displays perfectly on all devices.

WithThemeforest’shuge WordPress theme selectionyour website can be up and running in no time.