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It’s not a surprise that WordPress as a content management system is the best for news and blog websites. However, the main challenge for content-rich websites like blogs and magazines is achieving a perfect, functional design. That implies an adequate structure, attention to detail, a lot of space, and fully responsive layouts. Though there is a gazillion of free WordPress magazine themes, it’s unlikely an easy task to choose a really quality solution that fits perfectly your design and brand needs.
What are WordPress magazine themes?
These templates are specialized WordPress skins designed to present articles, news, and other types of content in an organized, engaging, and professional manner, much like what you would see in a print or digital magazine. They are a popular choice for online magazines, newspapers, blogs, content-heavy websites, or any site that aims to present a significant amount of information in an easily digestible format.
The defining characteristic that sets free magazine-style WP themes apart from other WordPress designs is their distinct layout. These templates typically incorporate multi-column grids, facilitating a well-structured presentation of information. It’s common for such skins to offer an assortment of widgetized spaces, which enables diverse sections of a webpage to highlight varied elements, such as a feature slider spotlighting top stories, distinct categories for diverse topics, and additional distinctive features like lists of recent posts, popular articles, and news tickers.
Free news WordPress themes are diverse in terms of functionality and design. To choose the best among free ones, you should switch on your inner detective! And we are going to help you with your search.
Key Elements Of Best Magazine Templates for WordPress
What are the key points to keep in mind when choosing the best template among free WordPress magazine themes?
- Clutter-free, organized design that doesn’t feel overwhelming. Even if you plan to focus on ads heavily, pay attention to the themes that offer an intelligent way to display them. Ads should feel like a natural part of the design.
- A great vista for visitors’ eyes – accent on images and catchy, compelling headlines. Although content is king for publishers, its visualization is queen – sometimes images are the real incentive behind the clicks.
- Flawless mobile experience. Modern news and blog website readers have worked up an appetite for the perfect mobile experience. They need your website to be quick and easy to scroll and click through, to be able to skim everything when commuting or during lunch. Make sure to give a brief test run to the mobile theme version.
- Handy & well-categorized navigation. It’s a common design practice for magazine websites to use different typefaces, colors, and sizes to deploy a perfect visual categorization. This can be applied to both menu and all design elements.
- Space for the highlights. Key news or posts can have a better distinction by being scaled visually, so the readers instantly see what news is really important. Moreover, key news banners help remove extra visual clutter.
- More contrast for better design elements hierarchy and crucial user experience.
We hope our brief guide will help you notice important things in the theme. Let’s get down to our collection of free WordPress magazine themes.
More WordPress Plugins for Magazine Sites
Top 4 Free WordPress Magazine Themes for Blogs
1. Colormag
| Author | Rating | Avg. Demo Speed Score |
|---|---|---|
| ThemeGrill | 5,0 | Mobile 90 Desktop 98 |
Colormag is one of the most popular magazine-styled themes which is also suitable for news and blogging sites. This template comes with a beautiful design that will help to attract more visitors to your site. It is fully compatible with WooCommerce and follows the best SEO practices that will help you rank higher.
The skin integrates more than 600 Google fonts so select the typeface that suits your website along with multiple color options that allow you to customize your online resource as you desire. In addition, this template also has a footer editor option in which you can change the information and design. This free magazine WordPress theme is fully compatible with the WPML plugin which will be very helpful for those who are looking to create a multilingual website.
Key features:
- WooCommerce compatible
- Advanced typography
- Unique post system
- Multiple color options
- Demo content
- Footer editor
- Social icons.
2. Avior
| Author | Rating | Avg. Demo Speed Score |
|---|---|---|
| MotoPress | 5,0 | Mobile 75 Desktop 98 |
Avior is most suited for personal blogs – it’s a totally free WordPress theme that offers lots of flexibility and all basic customization tools. The template comes packaged with a truly clean design, customizable colors, and fully customizable header and footer menus (allowing you to build really complex ones, with social menu integration).
Key features:
- Very flexible navigation menus
- Clean responsive design
- Several page templates (with and without sidebar)
- Ready-made shop design (WooCommerce).
3. Cenote
| Author | Rating | Avg. Demo Speed Score |
|---|---|---|
| ThemeGrill | 5,0 | Mobile 94 Desktop 99 |
Cenote is a simple and clean WordPress blog theme that comes with a one-click demo import feature, which is very helpful in the process of making your website beautiful quicker. You can also design the template yourself as it is packed with customizable features like boxed and wide layouts and primary color options.
This is a fully responsive free magazine WordPress theme that supports the sticky menu through which you can navigate your site easily on mobile devices, too. You can also add widgets in this template that can provide more functionality to your website. The skin comes with a built-in Social Icons plugin that will help you to connect with your visitors.
Key features:
- 4+ widgets areas
- Primary color option
- Custom CSS
- Optimized for speed and search engines
- Major browser compatible
- Fully supported
- Well documented
4. Echo Magazine
| Author | Rating | Avg. Demo Speed Score |
|---|---|---|
| Themeinwp | 5,0 | Mobile 55 Desktop 91 |
Echo is a free WordPress magazine theme that features stylish typography, great layouts hierarchy, lots of bold widgets, and multiple essential elements for a lifestyle or travel blog, culinary enthusiasts, and publishers. Using multipurpose widgetized areas, you’ll be able to bring a unique look to your theme.
Key features:
- Fully responsive
- Responsive slider
- 6 custom widgets
- Footer widgets
- Google Adsense spot
- Logo and title customization
Top 5 Free WordPress Magazine Themes for Newspapers
5. Flat Magazinews
| Author | Rating | Avg. Demo Speed Score |
|---|---|---|
| Superb | 5,0 | Mobile 69 Desktop 80 |
A user-friendly, minimalist WordPress theme for magazines and newspapers. Its features include customizable colors, backgrounds, and headers. The template has been optimized for SEO to ensure high visibility on search engines like Google and Yahoo. It also offers ample space for advertisements in various locations such as the top, sidebar, and footer.
With its responsive design and compatibility with schema markups, you can easily create editorial content on a wide range of topics including fashion, food, gaming, politics, recipes, travel, technology, memes, or revenue-generating subjects like cryptocurrency and betting.
Key features:
- Minimalist flat design
- Customizable appearance
- Optimized for SEO
- Responsive design
- Content versatility
6. WP Magazine
| Author | Rating | Avg. Demo Speed Score |
|---|---|---|
| Wpmagplus | 5,0 | Mobile 87 Desktop 98 |
This free magazine WordPress theme is a user-friendly option for bloggers, writers, and editors. It offers numerous features specifically designed for magazine-style websites or blogs. WP Magazine can be utilized by lifestyle bloggers, personal bloggers, online magazines, newspaper sites, news portals, and more.
With its various layout options for headers and footers, featured news sections, sliders, and category news areas along with unlimited Google fonts and color choices as well as an easy-to-use customizer – this template provides flexibility to meet your specific needs.
Key features:
- User-friendliness
- Multiple layout options
- Easy-to-use customizer
- Show/hide and drag/drop options for all sections
7. NewsMag
| Author | Rating | Avg. Demo Speed Score |
|---|---|---|
| Macho Themes | 4,5 | Mobile 77 Desktop 95 |
NewsMag is a widely used free WordPress magazine theme. The template features perfect on-balance layouts, bold headlines, and different categorized news sections. A complimentary version offers four blog styles so you can go with a more or less complex blog structure depending on your needs. A bundle of Font Awesome icons is also included. Use this free magazine WordPress theme to create a massive directory of news.
Key features:
- Widgetized sidebar and footer
- Advanced custom fields
- Custom colors and Google fonts
- Custom background support
- Top news banner
8. Viral News WordPress Theme
| Author | Rating | Avg. Demo Speed Score |
|---|---|---|
| HashThemes | 5,0 | Mobile 68 Desktop 76 |
Among multiple WordPress themes for newspapers, Viral News can be a decent choice. It comes with 6 predesigned demos that can be imported and installed with one click. These demos are carefully crafted and contain a professional look and engaging content to keep your visitors engaged for a longer period of time. Additionally, the theme is fully integrated with Elementor, allowing you to easily create any pages using the drag-and-drop process.
Viral News is an all-in-one free magazine WordPress theme that provides full versatility of tools to display your web content in an attractive and eye-catching way. There are 10+ stylish block layouts for you to choose from to differently represent the news category. Moreover, the template possesses an unlimited color scheme and typography options, so it will be easy to pick the most suitable color combination and fonts.
Key Features:
- 6 Importable Demo Layout
- Fully Compatible with Elementor
- 10+ Block Layouts
- Typography and Color Options
- Advertisement Ready
9. Mission News
| Author | Rating | Avg. Demo Speed Score |
|---|---|---|
| Ben Sibley | 5,0 | Mobile 87 Desktop 89 |
Mission News is a great free magazine WordPress theme made by developer and educator Ben Sibley. You’ll enjoy the thought-out classic design of this remarkable example of the best WordPress news themes. The template focuses on your content, so it’s suitable for literally any type of blog or magazine website.
If you are looking for a beautiful and functional minimalist design, this is your guy.
Key features:
- Aesthetic design with attention to detail (‘New York Times’ style)
- Delicate typography
- Easy setup & tutorials
Top 3 Free Responsive WordPress Magazine Themes
10. Newsphere
| Author | Rating | Avg. Demo Speed Score |
|---|---|---|
| Af Themes | 5,0 | Mobile 85 Desktop 95 |
Newsphere is an impressive WordPress theme for news and magazine websites. With its live customizer options and custom widgets, you can easily create an online resource that suits your style and preview the changes in real time. The template supports the WooCommerce plugin, allowing you to seamlessly integrate online business features into your newspaper template.
Among multiple WordPress newspaper themes, its numerous useful features make it ideal for blogging, as well as creating news, publishing, or review sites. The skin is highly optimized for search engines and offers excellent support from the team if any issues arise. It also provides a variety of demos to choose from when building your website.
Key features:
- Live customizer options & custom widgets
- Compatibility with Gutenberg & RTL support.
- WooCommerce compatibility
- SEO optimization
- Multiple demos
- Responsive design
11. Landing Page WordPress Theme for BundleStore
| Author | Rating | Avg. Demo Speed Score |
|---|---|---|
| MasterBundles | 5,0 | Mobile 85 Desktop 95 |
This free magazine WordPress theme is an excellent fit for you if your goal is to create a site to keep your audience updated on the best deal or newly released products of one or multiple software provider companies. You can easily build a coupon and discount finder site or software search and compare platform, become an affiliate marketer, and start getting revenue online without much effort needed.
Uncluttered and professional-looking, this template is built under the one-page principle and lets you create a self-filling website. Each section of the page is edited as a separate block where you can paste an affiliate link to the external source that you’d like your content to be imported from.
Key features:
- Landing page concept
- Powerful affiliate tool
- 12 pre-made page sections
- Self-filling content sections
- Coding-free customization
12. Silk Lite
| Author | Rating | Avg. Demo Speed Score |
|---|---|---|
| PixelGrade | 5,0 | Mobile 35 Desktop 77 |
Silk Lite is built by WordPress blog themes experts – Pixelgrade. These guys know everything about aspiring design and content-rich WP websites giving real strength even to their free WordPress magazine themes like Silk.
The template is built to provide readers with a flawless user experience across all modern devices so you can safely use it for either a personal blog or an established news website. The skin offers you delicate typography and a memorable front-page layout.
Key features:
- Stylish design
- Easy social integration
- Mobile-ready
- Stunning animation effects
Top 4 Free WordPress Magazine Themes with Slider
13. MH Magazine Lite
| Author | Rating | Avg. Demo Speed Score |
|---|---|---|
| MH Themes | 5,0 | Mobile 84 Desktop 93 |
MH Magazine Lite is one of the most popular, tried and trusted WordPress themes for magazine and blog websites. It features a classic design, with a good balance of blocks for content and ads. It’s well suited for different types of blogs – from tech news to politics.
Though its overall design is rather simple, it comes with well-thought-out color contrast, nice content block hierarchy, and really great performance.
Key features:
- 4 basic customizable widgets
- Contact form 7 plugin for general inquiries
- FlexSlider 2 with touch support
- Fully responsive
- Cross-browser compatible
14. Magazine Elite
| Author | Rating | Avg. Demo Speed Score |
|---|---|---|
| ThemeSaga | 5,0 | Mobile 82 Desktop 99 |
This is another bold and one of the most beautiful free WordPress magazine themes for different types of news websites. It provides lots of key features of a great magazine website: key news in the spotlight in a slider (a really lightweight homepage banner slider), a grid layout for categorized news and articles, a list of recent stories, a Pinterest-style blog, lots of widgets for media files and other content blocks.
The free magazine WordPress theme is a nice “fusion” solution for prolific bloggers and news creators. There are so many great features so it’s hard to believe all of them are really free in this template.
Key features:
- 1-click demo data import
- Support for audio, video, image, gallery, and quote post formats
- Semi-boxed and fullwidth page layouts
- Site layout customization
- Primarily sticky menu
- Lots of home page layout options: featured categories, full width with categories, panel grid categories, etc.
- Ajax posts load options
- Well documented
15. Madd Magazine
| Author | Rating | Avg. Demo Speed Score |
|---|---|---|
| Dessign | 5,0 | Mobile 63 Desktop 71 |
Madd Magazine is a fully responsive WordPress news theme for magazines, or blog websites with a built-in responsive slider. Madd magazine is a simple 3-column layout theme, with right and left widgets to add Google ads, latest posts, search bar, advertisement banners, etc.
This clean magazine focus theme will fit anyone thinking about building online presents or news-related websites. It’s easy to customize, and SEO optimized with Google fonts, color widgets, and image or video-featured posts. If you looking for well coded and beautiful design magazine theme Madd magazine should be your next theme to use.
Key features:
- 3-column layout
- Left and right sidebar
- Image & video slider
- Fully responsive
- SEO optimized
- PRO version available
16. Pencil
| Author | Rating | Avg. Demo Speed Score |
|---|---|---|
| Patryk Kachel | 5,0 | Mobile 92 Desktop 92 |
Pencil is a nice minimalist free news WordPress theme for all relevant websites. It comes with a very elegant, clean look and several front-page blog layouts (Masonry and List). It can be well suited for fashion and culinary blogs, book reviewers, and other creative ideas.
With a great variety of post formats offered, you can present your post as a standard one, gallery, audio, or video. Overall, Pencil is one of the most feature-rich free WordPress themes for blogs and news websites.
Key features:
- Homepage slider with sticky posts
- 2 single post layouts (with or without sidebar)
- 2 widget areas
- Smooth scrolling
- Real-time editing in WordPress Customizer
Concluding Words
WordPress, with its expansive array of templates, proves to be an excellent content management system for news, blog, and magazine websites. Despite the challenges of designing a content-rich online resource that offers a blend of a great structure, ample space, and full responsiveness, free WordPress magazine themes offer a robust solution.
Whether you are looking for a template that offers clutter-free design, excellent mobile experience, well-categorized navigation, or space for highlights, the diverse selection of options is sure to have a solution that meets your requirements.
Hopefully, in this roundup of free WordPress magazine themes, you’ve managed to find the best one that ticks all your boxes! In case you need a few interesting ideas for your blog site, take a look at these top informational websites.
Disclosure: this article may contain affiliate links for third-party products. If you click a link and later make a purchase, we may earn an affiliate commission that doesn’t result in additional charges to you.
FAQ
What magazines use WordPress?
- TechCrunch: A leading technology publication resource that reports on the business of technology, startups, venture capital funding, and Silicon Valley.
- Vogue India: An extension of the globally recognized fashion and lifestyle magazine, Vogue, tailored for its Indian readership.
- BBC America: The American offshoot of the British Broadcasting Corporation uses WordPress to deliver content to its viewers.
It’s important to note that while these online resources use WordPress, they likely employ customized templates or design frameworks to match their unique branding needs.
Which theme is best for a magazine in WordPress?
- Colormag: As one of the most popular WordPress magazine themes, it offers various pre-made templates, supports videos from YouTube, and is integrated with WooCommerce and other popular plugins.
- NewsMag: This skin comes with several blog layouts and is compatible with Gutenberg, Elementor, and WPBakery, making it quite versatile.
- MagPlus: Known for its high-speed performance and design flexibility, this premium theme offers more than 40 demos to choose from. It’s SEO optimized and supports video posts, Google AMP, and WooCommerce.
Keep in mind, the optimal template will hinge on specific requirements such as the type of content, aesthetic preferences, technical skills, and budget constraints.
Where can I get free WordPress themes?
- Official Repository: Visit the most popular source for templates (and plugins too) at https://wordpress.org. There you can find thousands of free themes that are reviewed and approved by the WordPress team. Simply search for a skin that fits your needs and download it.
- Third-party Websites: There are also many other online resources that offer free WordPress themes. Always be cautious when downloading from third-party sites, as some may contain unwanted code.
Please remember to review user feedback and ratings, as well as to test the template in a staging environment before implementing it on a live site, to ensure compatibility with your WordPress version and plugins.
