You can visibly see how internet technology is affecting our daily lives. Nowadays, people have developed the habit of accessing the internet quickly for finding out recent news, trends, and updates.
Hence, the best way to relay news to maximum number of people is by creating a news portal. The easiest, quickest, and best way to create a news portal is WordPress. But why WordPress? Because it is an excellent platform for designing your site. You don’t need any coding experience to build your website. Most importantly, it is reliable. The New York, Vogue, CNN Pressroom, and other top brands in the news sector use WordPress for their official websites.
You too can be successful in building a top news portal. There are several WordPress themes with which you can easily design your website. Better news – these WordPress themes are free.
We have listed out the best WordPress News Portal Themes that you can download for free and install on your news website.
Table of content
A. Considerations for News Portal WordPress Themes
- Custom Widgets
- Search Engine Optimization
- Light-weight and Fast Loading
- Plugin Support
- Responsive Design
- Social Media Integration
B. Free WordPress Themes For News Portals
- Newsmatic
- Digital Newspaper
- PubNews
- NewsBlogger
- Trendy News
- Newspaperex
- ChromeNews
- ColorMag
- Newsup
- News Portal
- Poseidon
- HitMag
- Cream Magazine
- CoverNews
- Minimalist Newspaper
- SuperMag
- Newsphere
- General News
- Newsis
- FreeNews
- Viral News
- Grace Mag
- Meta News
- Royale News
- Digital Newspaper Plus
- Local News
- Blogpaper
- Magbook
- News Elementor
- NewsTick
- NewsExo
- Pressbook News
Considerations for News Portal WordPress Themes
– Custom Widgets
Custom widgets are elements you can add to various parts of your website. It expands the functionality of the contents present on your homepage.
Hence, you should look for custom widgets in the News portal WordPress theme that will make it easier to manage the content.
– Search Engine Optimization
SEO increases the visibility of your website in search engine results. As a result, you obtain more traffic.
As a result, to make your new website visible to readers, you should select themes that are well-optimized for SEO.
– Light-weight and fast loading
A user prefers websites that can give results in a short amount of time. Keeping this in mind, your site’s performance regarding the speed to load your page highly matters.
Hence, seek a news portal theme that is lightweight and quick to load, so your site can quickly provide the information the visitor requires.
– Plugin support
When you want to improve the functionality of your website, you will require plugins.
As a result, the news portal theme should be compatible with other plugins. Therefore, make sure your theme supports various popular plugins.
– Responsive design
Responsive design allows websites to adapt to different platforms, devices, and browsers. You can get traffic from any browser and devices like mobile and computers.
That is why your news website needs to be adaptable to all devices. Thus, pay attention to the responsive design feature in News portal themes and offer a positive user experience to increase readers.
– Social media integration
Social media integration allows you to sync all your social media platforms. This way, you can redirect your social media followers to your website.
Therefore, always choose those news themes that support social media integration that can link different social platforms to your website.
Free WordPress News Portal Themes
1. Newsmatic
Newsmatic theme is a fast, responsive, and easy-to-use free WordPress theme specially designed for news and blog website. It has active installations of over 20,000 with excellent reviews.
This theme offers various styling options, color options, and pre-built demos to make it easier to design a perfect website. Moreover, it provides good technical support to help you get the most out of this theme.
Main Features of Newsmatic Theme:
- Customizer Image Editor – Specify different image height, size, and border radius for different device categories
- Multilingual Compatible
- 15+ free starter demos, 5+ templates, and 8+ custom Newsmatic widgets
- One-click demo import
- Mobile Responsive
- GDPR Compliant
- Schema ready
- Free Support
2. Digital Newspaper
Digital Newspaper theme has captivated 5000+ WordPress news website owners with its unprecedented features. The main banner has a professional 3 columns design that’s best suitable for news sites. It comes with 7 front sections with 7 different news block layouts and 9 custom Digital Newspaper widgets. You will get to choose separate colors and designs for all main elements of the page at both the initial and hover states.
There are typography controls (5 font families, and font-weight) for Site title, Navigation Menu, Block Title, Post Title, Post Meta, Post Content, Archive, and Single Post. The theme provides custom breadcrumb trail options for popular plugins – Breadcrumb NavXT, Yoast SEO, and Rank Math SEO plugin.
You will get a welcome dilemma in having to choose between 5 front page sidebar layouts, 5 archive sidebar layouts, 5 post sidebar layouts, 5 page sidebar layouts with sticky option in each layout, and 2 basic archive layouts.
Also, the header section can be made sticky upon scrolling up and the theme has a scroll-to-top button. Enjoy the preference to select between boxed and full-width layouts in all sections. Available with 5+ pre-built starter websites, that you will get to install in one click.
Main Features of Digital Newspaper Theme:
- Professional 3 columns design – List, Slider, and Grid – that’s best suitable for news website.
- 5+ starter demos, 5+ templates, and 9+ custom news widgets
- 7 news block widgets
- Multilingual Compatible
- One-click demo import
- Mobile Responsive
- GDPR Compliant
- Schema ready
- Free Support
3. PubNews
Pubnews is an exceptional news portal theme designed to satisfy all your requirements. It is customizer-based as well as fully compatible with Elementor builder.
It has 4+ free starter demos, in addition to Elementor starter sites. We recommend using PubNews theme with News Kit Elementor Addons plugin if you love building your website with Elementor. It’s also available with a child theme.
Main Features of PubNews Theme:
- 7 front sections, 7 block layouts, and 14 custom widgets.
- Main Banner with slider and trailing posts. Trailing posts can be stacked vertically or placed horizontally.
- 4+ free starter demos, in addition to Elementor starter sites.
- Compatibility with WordPress customizer, Elementor, and Gutenberg Block Editor.
- AJAX loading enables full utilization of the live customizer, allowing real-time editing of settings and previewing changes before saving.
- Built using ReactJS, ensuring speed and high performance.
- Instagram Section to showcase images with links.
- Show author image instead of icons only.
- Video playlist section.
- Default Light/Dark Mode as well as option for user selection.
4. NewsBlogger
NewsBlogger is a child theme of NewsCrunch theme with 10,000+ active installations on WordPress.
It is Compatible with popular plugins like Elementor, Contact Form 7, and translation plugins – Polylang and WPML.
It offers 3+ pre-built websites related to regular news, business news, and travel. Like Digital Newspaper theme, it has 3 column professional main banner design with a slider for primary posts and 2 trailing posts columns. In the sidebar, you can also add tabbed posts widget- recent, popular, and comments. As for the navigation menu, it has an off-canvas menu where you can add different widgets.
Main Features of NewsBlogger Theme:
- 5+ header presets, 2 animation effects each for post title and image hover
- 3 banner layouts, 2 ticker layouts, and 3 post grid column layouts
- 6 free content area widgets – Featured post, Post Grid 3 Column Slider, Post Grid 2 Column Slider, List Grid View, List View Slider, and overlay slider
- 5 free sidebar area widgets – advertisement sidebar, Post Grid 2 Column Sidebar, Post Tab Sidebar, Single Column Sidebar, and Social Icons Sidebar.
- Translation ready
- RTL ready
- Tutorial videos
5. Trendy News
Trendy News is a free WordPress news theme with an active installation of over 1000. It is rich in features that suits well for your professional news websites.
It has beautiful design, flexible elements, changeable colors, and animations. It is both Search Engine and Speed optimized to help reach more readers and retain them to your news portal. You’ll have a positive experience with trendy news.
Main Features of Trendy News Theme:
- One-click demo import.
- 3+ pre-built demos, Three widget title alignments, and 2+ templates
- Breadcrumb options: Default, Yoast and NavXT
- Lazy load image option
- Optimized for speed
- Free Support
6. Newspaperex
Newspaperex theme is a fast and modern-looking child theme of Newsup Theme which you can find on WordPress. This theme has an active installation of over 5000.
It is entirely widgetized, hence it’s simple to add widgets to a specific area. Likewise, it is SEO-friendly, RTL-ready, and has various customizer settings.
Main Features of Newspaperex Theme:
- One-click demo import of pre-built Elementor starter sites.
- Multi content layout
- Banner featured posts controls
- Translation ready
- WooCommerce compatibility
7. ChromeNews
ChromeNews is an excellent free WordPress News Theme and has 8000 plus active installations. ChromeNews comes with several capabilities to make a fantastic news website and blog.
ChromeNews supports translation and Gutenberg blocks which create content layouts. This theme is fully responsive to auto-adapt to any size of screen. Lastly, they do provide support if you encounter any difficulties.
Main Features of ChromeNews Theme:
- Basic typography style
- Breaking news section
- Multiple frontpage banner layouts
- 9+ free custom widgets
- RTL compatibility
- 3 category color options
8. ColorMag
ColorMag is a free WordPress theme for news websites and online magazines. You can create a sleek and contemporary website with ColorMag. More than 50,000 websites are now functioning in this theme.
ColorMag has reliable features like Search Engine Optimized, responsive design, and social icons so you can direct them to your various social networking profiles. Similarly, cross-browser compatibility works across several browsers like Google and Mozilla Firefox. Lastly, you can get free support for any issue related to the theme through the WordPress support forum.
Main Features of ColorMag Theme:
- WooCommerce compatible
- 10+ free pre-built demos
- Limited news ticker
- Default blog layout
- 7+ free custom widgets
9. Newsup
Newsup is a well-designed WordPress theme with 20,000+ active installations. It is a widgetized theme that’s easy to use and suitable for online newspapers, publishers, news, and magazines.
Newsup offers a multi-color option that lets you alter the background and text color of the block you are working on. Likewise, Newsup is SEO friendly, WPML, Gutenberg, Translation, and RTL ready.
Main Features of Newsup Theme:
- 6 archive layouts, 3 single blog page layouts, and 3 single page layouts
- WooCommerce compatible
- Multi color option
- WPML, Gutenberg, Translation, and RTL ready
- 8+ free custom widgets, and 4 widget areas.
10. News Portal
News Portal is a free WordPress theme with more than 7000 active installations. It works best for online publications, personal blogs, and newspapers.
This theme offers capable qualities for your needs, the widgets that enable you to add a specific feature to your website, responsive design, and retina-ready, allowing higher-resolution graphics and pictures with more pixels per square inch. Similarly, it delivers significant support for your requirements.
Main Features of News Portal Theme:
- Responsive design
- 5+ widgets with multiple layouts
- Multiple color scheme
- Retina ready
- Plugin compatibility
11. Poseidon
Poseidon is a splendid free WordPress theme, you can use this theme to build an elegant news website. It has an active installation of over 9,000.
The white layout makes your content spacious and it has clean typography. Likewise, it’s GDPR compliant; it protects the consumers’ data and their privacy. This theme is search engine optimized, speed optimized, and has a responsive design.
Main Features of Poseidon Theme:
- Compliant with GDPR
- Responsive layout
- Fast loading time
- Translation ready
- 4 magazine widgets – Grid, Columns, Vertical box, and Horizontal box
12. HitMag
HitMag WordPress Theme has excellent ratings and reviews with over 10,000 active installations.
HitMag Theme has 6 widget areas – Magazine Homepage, Main Sidebar, Header Advertisement Area, Footer Left Sidebar, Footer Mid Sidebar, and Footer Right Sidebar. Additionally, it has 4 different stylish post layouts.
Main Features of HitMag Theme:
- Customizer based and Gutenberg ready
- 2 column or 3 columns blog layout
- WooCommerce compatible and translation ready
- 6 widget areas
- Support forum on documentation page
- 4 post layouts
13. Cream Magazine
Cream Magazine is an excellent free WordPress theme for news and magazine websites. Its design is clean, modern, suitable for news websites, and has active installations of over 6,000.
It is a very easy-to-use and simple theme to set up your website. It has an authors widget that allows you to display the authors of your blog in your sidebar. Moreover, It has the option of lazy load for images, responsive, and WooCommerce compatible (making it easy and affordable to sell any product and service on your website).
Main Features of Cream Magazine Theme:
- News ticker
- 6 free front-page news widgets
- Related posts section
- Sidebar and footer options
- 2 header layout variations
14. CoverNews
CoverNews is a neat WordPress theme. It is perfect for news portals and has over 7,000 active installations. This theme is fully responsive and can adapt to any screen size.
CoverNews includes useful features such as one-click demo import that make it easy to set up, Gutenberg compatible for a more visible editing environment, and it is fully responsive. It provides outstanding support if you need any help.
Main Features of CoverNews Theme:
- Preloader option
- Logo and title customization
- Image banner advertisements
- 7+ free custom widgets
- Footer widgets section
15. Minimalist Newspaper
Minimalist Newspaper is a free child theme of Newspaperly WordPress Theme by SuperbThemes. It has been designed specifically for publishing sites, news sites, and magazines. Minimalist Newspaper has an active installation of over 2,000.
You have features like social icons, responsiveness, and related posts that pull relevant meta data from your blog to show at the bottom of your posts. You can integrate Ad programes like Adsense to your news website.
Main Features of Minimalist Newspaper Theme:
- Customize Logo & Title/Tagline
- Custom menu
- Multiple custom widgets available
- WooCommerce Settings
- Translation Ready
16. SuperMag
SuperMag is a great WordPress theme mainly designed for news, magazine, and blog. It has over 3,000 active installations and amazing reviews.
With SuperMag you can customize the header, footer, and sidebar with ease. Similarly, it has creative features like allowing to enable or disable Display Ads in the header, multiple ad positions, and breadcrumb options to navigate back to a previous page or to find new useful content, it also indicates the hierarchy of your website’s pages. Lastly, you will receive forum support.
Main Features of SuperMag Theme:
- Translation ready
- Breaking news option
- Social media integration
- Multiple ads position
- 2+ widgets
17. Newsphere
Newsphere is one of the best free WordPress themes particularly designed for the news, newspapers, magazines, and publishing site. This theme has active installations of over 2,000.
The features of Newsphere are pre-demos that you can choose from to build a website, translation ready, and fully responsive. It is coded and specially designed to make your site’s search engines optimized. Ultimately, it is ready to help you with your concerns.
Main Features of Newsphere Theme:
- Live editing in the customizer
- Popular tags section
- Off-canvas widget area
- 8+ custom widgets
- RTL compatibility
18. General News
The General News theme is a free child theme of MoreNews WordPress theme designed for news, blogs, and magazine websites. It has more than 1,000 active installations.
You can set it up with the single-click setup facilities. This theme has light and dark site modes, different customization tools, and supports RTL. Similarly, it helps you rank better in search engines.
Main Features of General News Theme:
- Child Theme of MoreNews Theme
- One-click demo import
- Gutenberg compatible
- Cross Browser support
- Basic typography style
- Multiple frontpage banner options
19. Newsis
Newsis Theme 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 5+ free pre-built starter websites that you can install in one click with Blaze Demo Importer.
Newsis Free Theme allows custom Ads banner that can be displayed on specific devices like desktop, tablet, or mobile.
In header, you can enable Off Canvas menu where you can add multiple widgets. It has also provided Newsletter/subscribe option, live search, and custom button for better engagement and user retention.
There are 11 free custom news widgets that can you add on right sidebar, left sidebar and off canvas menu.
In single post, you can enable related news, which can be shown in popup box or at the end of the post.
The theme provides custom breadcrumb trail options for popular plugins – Breadcrumb NavXT, Yoast SEO, and Rank Math SEO plugin.
Main Features of Newsis Theme:
- 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.
- GDPR Compliant
- Schema ready
- Free Support
20. FreeNews
FreeNews theme is a free WordPress theme. Using this, you can build all kinds of news sites. It has 1000+ active installations.
It has responsive design elements, seven social media icons, and SEO friendly coding. It supports RTL, allowing you to transform your entire website to show content from right to left.
Main Features of FreeNews:
- Responsive design
- WooCommerce compatibility
- 7-social icons,4 widgets, and 6-sidebar
- Post excerpt full content
- Supports default banner
21. Viral News
Viral News is a WordPress theme focused on a news portal, magazine, and blogs. It has an active installation of over 1000.
This theme has a clean and minimal design making it simple to understand. It offers a customizer panel with a live preview, translation ready, Search Engine Optimization, and pre-build demos features. It lets you add widgets in the designated area. Similarly, it is compatible with most of the plugins.
Main Features of Viral News Theme:
- GDPR compliance and cookies consent
- 4-custom widgets,
- Basic color options
- Translation ready
- Responsive design
22. Grace Mag
Grace Mag is a free WordPress theme suitable for news, magazine sites, and blogs. It has active installations of over 600.
This theme is simple, easy to use, and highly customizable. Some of its stunning features are; translation ready, regular updates, primary color option, etc. Altogether it is a helpful theme if you can take the best out of it.
Main Features of Grace Mag Theme:
- Translation ready
- RTL support
- Live customizer
- Primary color option
- Responsive design
23. Meta News
Meta News is a free news WordPress theme, it has 800+ active installations. It is specially created for news sites and magazine sites.
There is a built-in customizer to modify appearance settings in a live preview. Similarly, you have a theme option to change the layout of your website and the favicon that aids users in rapidly accessing the desired tab and recognizing your website.
Main Features of Meta News Theme:
- Translation ready
- 6 custom widgets
- Cross-browser support
- Custom menu
- Footer sidebar
24. Royale News
Royale news is one of the best WordPress themes for creating magazines and news websites. It has an active installation on over 900 websites.
In simpler terms, this theme is modern, lightweight, and minimal. Additionally, this theme includes the ticker news feature where you may display the newest news, announce a live streaming, or other breaking news you want to highlight.
Main Features of Royale News Theme:
- Responsive and mobile friendly
- Ticker news
- Custom widgets and widgets areas
- General theme options
- Regular updates
25. Digital Newspaper Plus
Digital Newspaper plus is the latest news theme by Blaze Themes with 9+ free pre-built websites.
The live customizer of the theme has been optimized to take less resources of your computer when you customize your website, so it’s really fast and efficient to use.
It is also compatible with Elementor builder and comes with a free Elementor pre-built website.
It has three main banner layouts, 3 blog/archive layouts, 3 block title layouts, and 3 page width layouts. It is also adorned with website preloader animation, cursor animation, and hover effects.
You can upload multiple header images above the header menu, and randomize those uploaded header images, so a user may see a different header image on different visits. In the main banner, you can choose slider settings, and popular slider settings.
Main Features of Digital Newspaper Plus Theme:
- 9+ free pre-built websites
- 3 main banner layouts, 3 blog/archive layouts, 3 block title layouts, and 3 page width layouts
- Compatible with Elementor builder and comes with a free Elementor pre-built website.
- 4 footer layouts
- Show a random header image to the visitors for better effectiveness
26. Local News
Local News is yet another well-designed free theme specially created for news sites. It has 600+ active installations.
This free theme includes menu typography options and customizable layouts that allow you to build a website. Local News is a lightweight and search engine optimized theme that delivers smooth performance.
Main Features of Local News Theme:
- Theme color, presents, background images
- Availability of ticker news
- Sticky sidebar and header
- Search engine optimized
- Technical support
- Free Support
27. Blogpaper
Blogpaper is a sleek, fast, and modern Best Responsive News Magazine WordPress theme, built as a child theme of Blogus.
It is a widgetized theme so widgets are used to manage the site content. It currently has over 1,000 active installations.
Blogpaper Theme is SEO-friendly, supports WPML, Gutenberg, translation, and RTL compatibility.
Main Features of Blogpaper Theme:
- Single Post Layout
- One Click Demo Import
- Breadcrumb options for Rank Math, Yoast, and NavXT plugins
- RTL ready
28. Magbook
Magbook Theme has light and neat display design. It currently has 3000+ active installations on WordPress.
Magbook Free Theme has 4 starter websites that can be imported to your site within few clicks using Theme Freesia Demo Import plugin.
It can be used with Breadcrumb NavXT to show breadcrumbs trails in your website while Newsletter plugin is recommended for newsletter subscription.
Main Features of Magbook Theme:
- Lifetime free updates
- One Click Demo Import
- 5 Front page elements
- 3 custom widgets – TF: Category Box Two Layout Widget, TF: Category Box Widget, and Popular Posts, Tags and Comments Widget
29. News Elementor
News Elementor Theme is a powerful, feature-rich WordPress theme designed specifically for news websites, online magazines, and blogs with Elementor Builder.
It brings the best out of News Kit Elementor Addons and extends functionality of Elementor Builder with 50+ premium widgets and layouts.
Additionally, it offers 17+ pre-built professionally designed news, magazine, and blog templates.
Main Features of News Elementor Theme:
- Full Elementor Integration
- 17+ pre-built professionally designed websites
- 50+ premium widgets and layouts for Elementor
- Customizable Header & Footer
30. NewsTick
NewsTick is a child theme of NewsMunch theme with 2,000+ active installations.
In this theme, you can display tag clouds on the front page for the users to browse the news assigned with relevant tags. Naturally, you can also use tag clouds widget in the sidebar and footer.
It has 8 widget areas- 4 footer columns, frontpage left and right sidebars, archive/post sidebar, and Menu Side Docker Widget Area.
NewsTick is AMP ready. It needs Desert Companion plugin to import its 1 free demo.
Main Features of NewsTick Theme:
- Off Canvas Menu
- Light/dark mode
- AMP ready
- 2 custom widgets, Latest Post Grid and Latest Post List, in 8 widget areas
- Breadcrumb option
31. NewsExo
NewsExo is a relatively new theme in WordPress which has 2,000+ active installations and it’s gaining more recognition among users.
The default pre-built website of Newsexo theme is animation heavy, which seems to be well liked by users. The content and design layout is tightly packed with minimum margin left on both sides.
Primarily, it is customizer based and posts can be managed with Gutenberg block editor. Additionally, it can be used with Elementor builder.
It only has 1 free pre-built website, which is imported with the use of One Click Demo Import (OCDI) plugin. It requires the installation of Contact Form 7 and Post Types Order plugin when installing the theme.
Main Features of NewsExo Theme:
- 3 layout designs – Full width, left sidebar, or right sidebar
- Uses Google fonts, CSS3 style and FontAwesome icons
- Compatible with Elementor builder
- 3 custom widgets – Grid View, List View, and List View 2
- Compulsorily required plugins – Contact Form 7 and Post Types Order
- Ticker news and advertisement banner in the header section
32. PressBook News
PressBook News ,child theme of Pressbook Theme, provides blocks in header and footer area, and widgets. The Theme offers sticky-floating sidebar, custom header background, and navigation menu on top bar. It does not provide dark mode option in the free theme. It currently has 500+ active installations.
Pressbook News Theme offers posts carousel with autoplay option in the header, footer, and related posts section. The posts in the posts carousel slider can be shown randomly or based on categories or tags.
Main Features of PressBook News Theme:
- Double sticky sidebar
- Alternative styles for the existing blocks
- Light Color (Single option only)
- RTL Language support
- Translation ready
Wrapping it up!
We have come to the end of our article. We have listed out and described the points you need to look for in the News Portal WordPress theme. Similarly, we explained the major features of 30 Free WordPress Themes for the News Portal.
In our opinion, the Newsmatic WordPress theme is the best of all. With dedicated developers, they are constantly working hard to give you and your site the best experience. Newsmatic Theme regularly adds different features and starter demos that can be imported in one click.
Hence, due to Newsmatic theme’s dependable features, it is on the top of our ranking.
We hope you found this post helpful. So, You can now create your news website. Please feel free to express your ideas to help us form better articles. Thank you!!
