In today’s digital age, a captivating website is key to success for news organizations and journalists. If you’re in the business of delivering news and updates to your audience, having a well-designed website is essential.
With WordPress being one of the most popular content management systems out there, it’s no surprise that there are plenty of themes available specifically tailored for news websites.
But with so many options to choose from, finding the best news WordPress themes can be a daunting task.
That’s why we’ve done the hard work for you and rounded up some of the top contenders in this article. Whether you’re running an online magazine, a newspaper website, or a simple blog, these themes will surely help you create a visually stunning and user-friendly platform to engage with your readers effectively.
Related: Best News Portal Themes for Free Download
Table of content
- Newsmatic
- Newsis
- SmartMag
- JNews
- Newspaper
- Jannah
- Soledad
- Foxiz
- Digital Newspaper
- Newsup
- ColorMag
- Magazine Pro
- Magazine Newspaper
Considerations to make while choosing the Best News WordPress Theme
SEO friendly
The News Theme has to be SEO friendly so as to make it easier to rank top on search engines.
Ratings & Reviews
Check the ratings and reviews of the theme on WordPress, Trustpilot, or other genuine customer review sites. You can find out users’ experience and review of the theme before having to buy it.
Support
Find out about the support time, methods, and policies – whether they use live chat, or tickets, time zone difference, paid or free support, etc.
Page Loading Speed
The News Theme has to be fast-loading to reduce bounce rate and retain readers. You can check out the page loading speed of the website with online tools like PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, Pingdom Speed Test, etc.
Mobile Responsiveness
Test whether the theme loads perfectly on different screen sizes on different devices. Your news readers can come and read from any kind of devices with different screen sizes.
Customizability
Check out how much personalization and customization options does the theme have. You might want to edit the theme to suit your brand, extend functionalities to your website, so choose the theme that grants full customizability.
Plugins Compatibility
Plugins help you extend functionalities and features to your website. Make sure the theme supports the plugins required for your website.
Best News WordPress Themes
1. Newsmatic
Star Ratings: 5 out of 5 on WordPress
Newsmatic is the complete News WordPress Theme with 10,000+ active installations and excellent reviews on WordPress. It has 27 pre-built websites that you can import to your website with Blaze One Click Demo Import.
It is an advanced customizer-based theme that allows you to personalize various design aspects of your website. With a user-friendly interface, it is easier to use and is time efficient while creating a unique news site.
Key features of Newsmatic:
- 30+ unique design patterns
- In-built image editor for specifiying image height, border radius, and image size.
- Elementor compatible
- Built with ReactJS so, it’s fast and provides high performance
- AJAX loading so, you can fully utilize the live customizer by editing all the settings and see live changes before saving it.
- RTL and multi languages ready
2. Newsis (New release)
Star Ratings: 5 out of 5 on WordPress
Newsis Theme is a recently released theme in WordPress, that has a primary slider along with 2 trailing posts columns in the main banner section. The 2 trailing posts columns in the main banner can be displayed on stack or side-by-side.
It comes with 4+ free pre-built starter websites that you can install in one click with Blaze Demo Importer.
There are 11 free custom news widgets that can you add on right sidebar, left sidebar and off canvas menu.
Newsis Free Theme allows custom Ads banner that can be displayed on specific devices like desktop, tablet, or mobile.
Key features of Newsis:
- Primary slider along with 2 trailing posts columns in the main banner section.
- 4+ starter demos, and 11+ custom news widgets
- 6 news blocks
- Multilingual Compatible
- One-click demo import
- Mobile Responsive
- Off Canvas Menu
- Related News in single post page.
3. SmartMag
Star ratings: 4.75 out of 5 on Themeforest
SmartMag is a responsive WordPress Theme for news, magazine, and blog websites, developed by ThemeSphere. With SmartMag Theme, you can create a professional and engaging website with a variety of customization options.
This premium theme has a powerful page builder for you to create custom layouts and designs without coding knowledge. Similarly, it uses the best SEO optimization practice to help you rank higher and the performance of SmartMag is elite.
Key features of SmartMag:
- Powerful page builder
- 27+ Demos
- Multiple post formats like posts, galleries, videos, and audio, and different layouts like full-width right sidebar, or a custom sidebar.
- Live Search AJAX
- Custom archives and footer builder layout
4. JNews
Star ratings: 4.85 out of 5 on Themeforest
It is integrated with the popular page builder Elementor which allows users to easily create custom website designs without any knowledge of coding.
JNews is packed with features and customization options. It is fast, lightweight, SEO-friendly, and highly customizable for creating a professional and engaging news website. Similarly, this Theme has a broad range of pre-built templates, you can import with just one click.
Key features of JNews:
- 50+ customizable homepage layouts that are fully integrated with Elementor page builder
- 67+ pre-built websites
- JegAI Assistant tool that provides AI-powered solutions to automate content creation and optimization.
- Improves visibility on search engines with the help of JSON LD for website schema, Lazy Load to reduce half of the website site at the first-time load, Google AMP Support, and Google Analytic Support.
5. Newspaper
Star ratings: 4.81 out of 5 on Themeforest
Newspaper Theme provides tagDiv Composer plugin to build pages. Furthermore, it also provides tagDiv Opt-in Builder – membership and paywall plugin – which can be used to create paid news websites.
There is tagDiv CSS Analyzer Tool that analyzes page structure and removes unnecessary CSS. You can access tagDiv Cloud Library and use over 1300+ elements and templates.
Newspaper Theme offers 1300+ pre-made designs for sections, pages, posts and other WordPress Templates through tagDiv Cloud Library
Key features of Newspaper:
- tagDiv Opt-in Builder – Membership and Paywall plugin to create paid news websites.
- Core Web Vitals ready
- Popups for user registration, fly-out menus, and membership login
- 27 custom drag and drop elements designed for WooCommerce
- Huge library of 155+ pre-built news websites that can be directly imported and installed to your website
- Header and footer builder
- Mega Menu
Furthermore, Newspaper is one of the highest selling WordPress Themes in Newsforest.
6. Jannah
Star ratings: 4.81 out of 5 on Themeforest
Jannah is AMP integrated theme (Accelerated Mobile Pages) with lifetime free updates.
It has adblocker detector to detect if the readers have installed Adblocker extension in their browser. The adblocker detector can be made aggressive by replacing featured images of the news with a placeholder image.
You can enable auto load posts feature which will automatically load next related post underneath the current post when the reader reaches the end of the post he is reading.
Key features of Jannah:
- AMP integrated
- Core Web Vitals ready
- Lifetime free updates
- Adblocker detector
- WPML compatible to make your news site multilingual
- Social media accounts integration to show your social media posts on your website
- Article inline Ads to show ads inside the article content.
7. Soledad
Star ratings:- 4.87 out of 5 on Themeforest
Soledad theme has been highly optimized to load fast and provide high performance. It scores high numbers in Google Pagespeed for mobile and desktop.
Soledad offers Penci AI SmartContent Creator (with the support of OpenAI) that will generate content, suitable article titles and AI images if you enter a keyword.
The theme also supports text to speech. Readers just need to press the play button and article content will be read out loud. You can also enable post paywall system with Penci Paywall plugin.
Key features of Soledad:
- 230+ pre-built sites
- 6886+homepage demos
- 1000+ pre-built blocks
- Drag and drop header and footer builder
- RSS Aggregator plugin
- AI SmartContent Creator with the support of OpenAI
- Text to speech plugin for readers to listen to article
8. Foxiz
Stars ratings:- 4.93 out of 5 on Themeforest
Foxiz Theme is recommended to be used with Elementor builder. There are more than 35 blocks, with 100+ options in each block. It has newly introduced a builder for header, footer, homepages, categories, tags, archives, and such.
The theme’s core web vitals grade is excellent and special attention has been given to mobile design. A unique mobile menu, and Front-end font size resizing grant the readers a privilege to access content quickly and read comfortably.
Key features of Foxiz:
- Compatible with AMP transitional mode. AMP Transitional mode is a good choice to offer AMP version on mobile devices while showing non-AMP version on desktop browsers.
- Bookmark feature to allow both guest and logged-in users to bookmark articles to be read later.
- Subscription and paywall system
- Header and footer builder
- Mega Menu builder
9. Digital Newspaper
Star ratings: 5 out of 5 on WordPress
Digital Newspaper Theme has 19+ pre-built websites that can be used for different types of news websites. It has 3 column banner layout that is most suitable for news websites. With a plenty of header styles, typography and block layouts, it’s easy to build a professional news website to your desire.
There are top header, and main header, which can be customized to show navigation menu, ticker news, or elements such as date/time, newsletter, social icons, etc.
Key features of Digital Newspaper:
- 19+ starter demos, 5+ templates, and 9+ custom news widgets
- Professional 3 columns design – List, Slider, and Grid – that’s best suitable for news website.
- 7 news block widgets
- RTL and Multi languages ready
- GDPR Compliant
- Compatible with Elementor
10. Newsup
Star ratings: 4.81 out of 5 on WordPress
Newsup offers 17 pre-built websites for different kinds of news websites that can be imported with one-click demo import plugin.
With Newsup, you can display single post with different layouts by either keeping left sidebar, right sidebar, or fullwidth content display.
It’s been built with Bootstrap. Bootstrap framework is bloated with css codes that might not be needed for the theme so some excess and unnecessary code will be Newsup Theme.
Key features of Newsup:
- RTL Ready
- AMP Ready
- Elementor builder custom widgets
- Made with Bootstrap
11. ColorMag
Star ratings: 4.92 out of 5 on WordPress
ColorMag is developed by ThemeGrill and has been competing on the market for a long time. It’s well optimized, and gives high performance that can be used for any publishing sites. The design is clean and you can manage your content in an impressive and personalized manner.
It offers a 14 days ‘No Questions Asked’ refund policy.
Key features of ColorMag:
- 25+ pre-built websites
- Integration with Gutenberg, Elementor, Beaver Builder, SiteOrigin, and Brizy page builders
- Translation & RTL Ready
- Google fonts Library
12. Magazine Pro
Star ratings: N/A on any independent platforms.
Magazine Pro has black and white layout in default with navigation bar on top header.
The theme is developed with Genesis framework. Genesis framework is an opensource WordPress framework founded by StudioPress. The primary editor of Magazine Pro is Gutenberg Block Editor. The theme’s settings, colors, and content can be edited with Live Customizer.
You can get this theme with Genesis Pro or WordPress hosting plans offered on StudioPress. Two WordPress hosting plans are offered – WP Engine and Flywheel.
Key features of Magazine Pro
- Developed with Genesis framework
- Gutenberg Editor along with Live customizer
- One click theme setup
13. Magazine Newspaper
Star ratings: 4 out of 5 on WordPress
Magazine Newspaper is a remarkable theme well suited for newspaper, media and magazine related projects.
The theme is easy to use and customize, even for beginners. With its intuitive drag-and-drop interface, users can easily change colors, fonts, layouts and other settings to match their brand identity.
The theme makes it easy to incorporate advertisement banners into the website, generating potential revenue streams without the complexities of coding.
Key features of Magazine Newspaper Pro
- Numerous news layouts
- Advertisement section
- One click Demo Import
Final Words!
Whether you’re a journalist, news agency, or an enthusiast that want to share news online, WordPress is the simplest way to create a news website. There are tons of News WordPress Themes that can help you build a professional and engaging site in a snap. Among them, these are the best themes that are currently popular and trending. You can’t go wrong with any of these themes. Pick the best theme that you like and start building your dream website today.
