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“These themes are hand-picked for their outstanding design quality, features, and customer reviews.”
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The news moves fast, and your site needs to keep up.
Whether you’re a traditional news outlet or you cover a specific industry, the layout of your site helps your content connect with your readers.
Newspaper themes offer a variety of features designed for fast-paced, content-rich sites. Many themes even allow for multiple headlines as well as videos, images, and other media.
If you use WordPress, there are plenty of newspaper themes available. Here are some of the best newspaper WordPress themes.
If this is your first website, follow our guide on how to create a news website. For more template suggestions, check out our list of magazine WordPress themes.
You can use Strive Content Calendar to schedule and manage all the articles you publish on your newspaper website.
WordPress Newspaper Themes
The themes below are modern, stylish, and fully responsive. That means they’re beautiful and mobile-friendly. They’re also compatible with the newest version of WordPress.
Here are my top picks for best newspaper WordPress themes for 2024.
1. Mission News by Compete Themes
Theme Description
Okay, I’m obviously biased with this first pick, but you’ve got to check out one of our most popular themes, Mission News. It’s got a classic New York Times style design, and best of all, it’s totally FREE (unlike the other themes listed here).
Mission News has a double sidebar layout that makes it easy to feature a ton of content on your site. You can showcase your latest posts in the center column while using the sidebars to promote specific posts or post categories. It also adapts beautifully to mobile devices, so it works great for visitors at home and on the go.
There’s a pretty robust set of customization options available for Mission News. You can choose from seven different layouts for the homepage, posts, and archives, all separately. You can even give individual posts and pages their own layouts. There are built-in social media icons for sharing your profiles, controls for hiding any element on the site, and seven widget areas that make including ads on your site simple. If you want even more flexibility and features for your site, there’s an upgrade called Mission News Pro available too.
2. Zox News by MVP Themes (Themeforest)
Theme Description
The Zox News theme is all about online publishing. With style similar to the new HuffPost design, your pages will pop off the screen with this bold and high-contrast style.
This is an excellent theme for serious publishers. From the screenshot alone, you can see that this template fits a ton of headlines on the screen at once and still makes room for images and eye-catching graphics. The designers have thought deeply about how a news website should function instead of simply making a pretty template.
Zox News was recently updated with complete Google AMP support, which is huge. AMP support is not easy to achieve in a WordPress theme requiring lots of custom development work, so having this feature included already is fantastic. For many verticals, AMP usage is not popular, but for news sites, it’s essential.
This newspaper theme also includes some handy integrations like the WooCommerce compatibility that lets you add a product store to your site and multiple premium plugins that come bundled with your purchase.
3. Newspaper by SKT Themes
Theme Description
When it comes to newspapers, this theme takes it to another level. This free theme includes a modern design and customization features that beginner and pro WordPress users will appreciate.
The SKT NewsPaper WordPress theme is highly customizable thanks to the page builder integration and custom header designer. It’s also responsive and written with search engine optimized code to help you promote your new content.
Using this theme, you can build a gorgeous and effective website, that attracts new readers and grows like crazy. Use the many widget areas to include advertisements and monetize the traffic you get from search and social websites. Your site will look great and perform well for all of your visitors, thanks to the responsive layout and HD image display.
4. Newspaper by tagDiv (Themeforest)
Theme Description
As the name suggests, this is one of the top themes for news-related sites. It is one of the most popular WordPress news themes ever, with over 100,000 people using Newspaper by tagDiv for news, blogs, newspapers, magazines, reviews, and any other websites.
Like a traditional newspaper (remember those?), this theme can be divided into topical sections. It is easily adaptable for posts of various lengths. The layouts can range from modern magazine-style designs to a classic news portal that looks like the NYT. Newspaper includes over 80 demo designs and 810+ pre-made layouts for articles and pages. These can be imported with a single click. The theme also supports full integration with YouTube, bbPress, BuddyPress, WooCommerce, and more.
All changes and customizations are visible live using the tagDiv Composer page builder. Change headers, menus, content, post layouts, and other page elements quickly and intuitively. Also, the Newspaper theme has a Header Builder, which is a great tool if you need more than one header style on the website. You can also add full-width Big Grids, Flex Blocks, social media networks, premium widgets, and more elements. Newspaper comes packed with the tagDiv Cloud Library that lets you import hundreds of pre-built design templates for posts and pages. Everything is done with the drag-and-drop functionality, so absolutely no coding knowledge is required! In the latest version, Newspaper comes with a new user interface for the tagDiv Composer and more intuitive features such as the search option through blocks.
The Newspaper theme lets you monetize your website with ease, using Google AdSense or banner ads in multiple areas. Moreover, the theme is AMP ready and SEO optimized. If you’re looking for a traditional or a modern theme capable of handling a lot of ever-changing news content, Newspaper has you covered.
5. Extra by Elegant Themes
Theme Description
If you want a highly customizable theme for your online newspaper, consider the Extra theme by Elegant Themes. This template has a huge variety of options and was designed to integrate with the Divi page builder plugin.
With the Extra theme and Divi, you can use a drag-and-drop builder to create a custom homepage design. Using the modules, you can add collections of posts in whatever layout you’d like. You have all the same options for your category archives too. With this kind of flexibility, you’ll have full control over which stories you want to highlight on the homepage every hour of the day.
Extra also includes post-template customization options so you can make your news stories look unique and beautiful on the web. The header builder allows you to change the layout, colors, and fonts used in the header and dramatically change your site’s feel. Extra also includes mega menus, secondary and footer navigation menus, post formats, follow buttons for social media, and so much more. You can click the link below to get more screenshots and a closer look at all the features included in Extra.
6. Elipsa by Edge Themes (Themeforest)
Theme Description
Elipsa is a magazine-style theme for online publishers with a flair for visuals and photography. Rather than taking a headline-centric design like most newspaper themes, this publisher’s template uses an image-heavy design with a unique layout. Speaking of which, Elipsa includes a wide variety of different styles, but the one featured above is especially interesting since the slider on the left stays in place as the visitor scrolls.
The Elipsa theme is powered by the Elementor page builder for creating its stylish layouts. There are pre-made pages and dozens of pre-styled blocks you can simply drop into any page. It also supports mega menus, newsletter popups, responsive image sliders, and WooCommerce for an eCommerce store.
With all that said, the best part of Elipsa is the huge variety of templates for the homepage and article pages. You’re sure to enjoy all the creative expression you get from this theme and its intuitive layout options.
7. CityNews by ThemeVan (Themeforest)
Theme Description
Let the words do the work with City News. Emphasizing a clean look with minimal frills, the City News news magazine theme is fast-loading and readable on both desktop and mobile.
The Visual Composer plugin integrates with City News for building custom page layouts. Four post types are available: Standard, Video, Gallery, and Audio. A built-in Mega Menu keeps readers in the loop by showcasing the most popular stories.
This column-based theme works great for displaying news articles, long-form pieces, and even personal journals. When you want your message clear and readable on practically any device, choose City News.
8. Digiqole by trippleS (Themeforest)
Theme Description
The Digiqole theme has more of a magazine feel and a friendly, upbeat design. Bright colors used for the tags and categories add visual variety to the design and make it more interesting to look at than the simpler, black & white designs of traditional news templates.
Like many themes these days, Digiqole is made to work with the Elementor page builder plugin. You can use widgets in Elementor and some custom widgets provided by Digiqole to create your homepage and other pages on the site. This clean theme also boasts full support for Gutenberg editor blocks making detailed layouts within your posts easy too.
Some other nice features include dark and light variations, a reading progress bar, a user review system, and a built-in infinite scroll feature. Even with all this functionality, Digiqole isn’t bloated, so your site will load quickly with it installed.
9. Grace Mag by Everest Themes
Theme Description
Grace Mag is a free WordPress theme that is perfect for your news, magazine website. Grace Mag is designed and developed with the WordPress coding standards, making it suitable for creating a magazine, blog, news, or personal site.Grace Mag is fully responsive, well-optimized, and highly customizable thanks to its integration with the WordPress Live Customizer. It includes advanced features, one of which requires any programming skill to use. The best qualities of Grace Mag are its simplicity in design and SEO-optimized code.Some of the best features include:- Well-designed custom widgets
- Latest trend banner and slider
- Adequate advertisement spaces
- RTL Support
- Built-in Social Widget
- Built-in Related Posts tool
- Optimized for SEO
- Quick load times
- Responsive and media-friendly
- Preview your customizations with the Live Customizer
Click the link below to find out what else Grace Mag can do.10. Buzzy by Mikado Themes (Themeforest)
Theme Description
If you want to start a viral news site in an industry like entertainment, pop culture, or even health & nutrition, Buzzy will be an excellent choice. This gorgeous theme is designed to promote tons of stories at once and has lots of viral features built-in.
Buzzy has a fun and colorful style that is fully customizable via the theme options included. There are six pre-designed homepages and dozens of beautiful content blocks available to build custom page templates. There are social sharing buttons, post reactions (like on Facebook), and you can mark posts as trending or hot. You won’t need to add a news plugin to get control over the latest posts on your site with this theme.
As a news organization, you’re likely aware of the struggles of ethically monetizing your work, i.e., avoiding clickbait titles for pageviews and ad clicks. Well, the Buzzy theme has complete WooCommerce integration so that you can sell your own merchandise straight from your site. If you develop a strong brand that visitors want to identify with, you’ll have no trouble earning a profit from merch sales with Buzzy.
11. Fineglobe by Republik WP (Themeforest)
Theme Description
If you’re looking for a classic news site design, you need to check out Fineglobe. Everything from the black and white color scheme, the condensed all-caps titles, and the limited white space makes this theme feel instantly classic.
Fineglobe excels at featuring huge quantities of content. There are numerous sections on the homepage and multiple sidebars for including even more stories. If you are a frequent publisher, you’ll enjoy the editorial control you get with Fineglobe. You could make a site like Huffington Post with a theme like this.
Fineglobe comes with all the customization tools you’ll need. There are seven layouts for the header, footer, post, page, and category pages. You also get a drag-and-drop page builder with the bundled Visual Composer plugin. With all the widget areas available, you could easily embed a news feed from external sources into your site too. You’ll be able to set up a design that perfectly suits your content objectives.
12. Storycycle by TemplateMonster
Theme Description
Storycycle is a clean and usable WordPress template intended to be used for a range of news sites. The clean and usable design of its pages is ready to be adjusted in a way that matches your personal project or brand ideally. Thanks to the integration of Elementor page builder, modifying the layout gets easier as you drag and drop different design elements.
The theme features a quick one-click installation for getting your site online fast. It’s equipped with a set of pre-designed pages that are ready to go live with minor adjustments. Downloading the template, you’ll be able to save extra cash on the purchase of premium extensions for your site. The Storycycle WordPress theme contains the JetElemets addon, MegaMenu builder, post slider layouts, and additional components for free.
The theme includes 24/7 support and detailed documentation. Thanks to the regular free updates, you will be able to access a growing collection of niche skins at no cost at all.
13. Newspaper by MyThemeShop
Theme Description
Newspaper’s layout combines a classic, elegant look with modern, multi-media functionality.
Newspaper works great for sites that publish a lot of content even multiple times a day. Sorting features like “trending” and “latest” allows readers to easily find the most up-to-date info. Create a content calendar and get to work publishing with this robust theme.
If your site frequently posts across multiple categories, you’ll likely love Newspaper’s numerous layout options and media-rich features. Plus, the theme is optimized to load quickly – even on mobile. Like most themes by MyThemeShop, Newspaper also has full RTL support for right-to-left languages.
Overall, Newspaper is a terrific way to create a glossy, professional media website.
14. Click Mag by MVP Themes (Themeforest)
Theme Description
Click Mag is a theme designed for the hippest, hottest, and most current content. This theme has a variety of features designed to help your content go viral. Fully responsive mobile features mean your site will be quick loading and readable on any device.
Readers help dictate design with Click Mag. Pageviews can determine which content is placed in the Trending News section. A “Continue Reading” button allows you to shorten stories when necessary, which allows you plenty of room to insert ads.
If your content is fast-moving and interactive, you’ll love Click Mag. The theme combines the classic cool of a popular magazine with the modern features of a viral-centered website.
15. Newsmag by tagDiv (Themeforest)
Theme Description
With the sleek, modern look of a glossy news magazine, Newsmag is a popular choice across many different publishing niches. By combining design and functions, Newsmag provides various ways to display, broadcast, and publish content. The theme comes with 14 one-click demo designs, a frontend page builder with over 100 elements you can drag and drop to design your website with ease.
The premium widgets provide custom information for your readers, such as weather forecasts, exchange market updates, social network activity, ad boxes, and more.
The Newsmag theme can create fast pages with stylish big grids, beautiful header or footer layouts, smart lists, and custom slider gallery for unique articles. If you want readers to check in on your site every day, Newsmag is the right WordPress theme for you.
16. Sahifa by TieLabs (Themeforest)
Theme Description
More and more people use their smartphones to access the web. With Sahifa, your blog is accessible on any browser and device. The theme automatically resizes and adapts to fit every screen. Since the entire post grid at the top can be placed into slides, Sahifa is a great choice for a newspaper theme with a slider.
Customizing your site is a snap with the powerful admin tools. You can configure theme settings, colors, fonts, and layouts. Over four hundred design options in total are available. There’s a breaking news ticker, customizable header layout, and so much more.
With over $74 worth of bundled plugins, Sahifa has a lot to offer publishers. Great functionality and style for readers on both desktop and mobile devices.
17. Volt by Saurabh Sharma (Themeforest)
Theme Description
Volt is a simple newspaper WordPress theme that gets straight into your content. Without a large slider image taking up space, visitors will immediately find themselves browsing top headlines.
The Volt theme is a bit plain compared to some other themes on this list, but it is also well-designed in many regards. The characters-per-line in posts are kept around 75, which is ideal for reading, new content is easy to discover, and all the text is easy to read.
Volt provides a few different layouts and utilizes custom widgets and shortcodes for customizing the page structure. There are seven widget areas in total, which means you can add all content types throughout the site. Volt also comes with built-in social sharing buttons and WooCommerce support for on-site eCommerce.
18. Newser by Zozo Themes (Themeforest)
Theme Description
Looking to create a high-quality, glossy magazine – but one which stands out from the crowd? Newser is a feature-rich theme for blogs, newspapers, magazines, review sites, and other publishers.
Newser’s dynamic layout features give you a ton of creative freedom to alter the appearance of both your site and each article. All customization can be done with simple drag-and-drop functionality.
If you’re looking for an easy way to design a unique news site, check out Newser today.
19. Read and Digest by Elated Themes (Themeforest)
Theme Description
The Read and Digest theme has more of a magazine-style look but will work for any news site. There’s a great balance between the post titles and Featured Images and an overall modern and pleasing aesthetic.
This news theme includes a few layouts for mega menus, which are excellent for helping visitors find more content on the site. The individual post pages are quite beautiful, with the title overlaying a large image. Category archives are significant for a news site and Read and Digest has an effective design.
Read and Digest includes an enormous number of features. You’ll need to visit some of the demos to get a good idea of what this theme can. There are tons of layout variations and standard customization options like custom colors, fonts, etc.
20. TopNews by CodexCoder (Themeforest)
Theme Description
Versatility meets simplicity with Top-News, a publishing theme suitable for topics from hard news to light features and everything in-between. With multiple variations and headline options, you can easily create a custom look using the drag-and-drop page builder.
Predesigned demos are also available, covering a wide variety of topics, including Fashion, Sports, Tech, Travel, and more. Top-News is fast-loading, user-friendly, and displays on both high and low resolutions.
Top-News is a feature-rich theme suitable for news and magazine-based blogs. But Top-News is also an excellent theme for non-traditional niche publishing.
21. Bitz by MNKY (Themeforest)
Theme Description
Breaking news today is old news tomorrow. Bitz lets you publish and display a constant flow of fresh content. Articles can be displayed in 10 different styles. You can also order news stories by title, views, date, and other guidelines.
If you cover a niche industry, you’ll love Bitz’s ability to create personalized categories. Each category can even be given a custom style. This creates a visually striking alternative to traditional article categories.
Custom timing options, along with custom categories, make Bitz an excellent theme for online news sites centered around breaking news and up-to-the-minute info.
22. Gridlove by meks (Themeforest)
Theme Description
do you have a content-rich site? Present your articles in an organized, reader-friendly manner with Gridlove. This theme offers a variety of predesigned layouts designed to create an orderly arrangement of multiple articles.
Gridlove is all about speed. Setup involves just the click of a button. Drag-and-drop customization is visible in real-time. Finally, articles are designed to load quickly for readers.
If your site cycles through a lot of content daily, Gridlove is a great way to keep your site organized, well-designed, and attractive to readers.
23. Noozbeat by CSSIgniter
Theme Description
Do you want a theme with the look of a high-end, glossy magazine? Noozbeat has got you covered. This theme includes over 30 distinct color options along with multiple category layouts.
Want to get started right away? You can select one of the ten pre-built homepage layouts or six built-in layouts for featured posts.
Want to create a site that is different from the competition? Customization options allow you to create a site that is completely your own. The theme includes custom widgets for content, social networking, and more.
Noozbeat is also one of the few themes which include built-in space for advertising. Ad spots allow you to insert ads into your site naturally. The theme is a great choice for sites that want a professional but unique magazine style website.
24. Herald by meks (Themeforest)
Theme Description
Herald puts the power of an entire publishing house into your hands. Design the exact site you want with over 500 layout options, unlimited sidebars, four pagination types, custom widgets, and more. The advanced theme options panel lets you create a custom look in literally minutes – and no coding is required.
Incredibly responsive, Herald themes load quickly and work flawlessly on desktops, laptops, and various smart devices.
Whether you publish hard news, light features, or a little bit of everything, Herald has dynamic newspaper layout options, which you’ll love.
25. Neuton by CSSIgniter
Theme Description
A news style layout often emphasizes functions over form. Neuton attempts to merge both with a unique design that presents multiple main stories simultaneously. Seven different category layouts, including slideshows, allow you to customize your site quickly.
The Neuton theme works great for blogs that post new pieces of content throughout the day. The most discussed content on the site can be highlighted in the Trending Topics section. Plus, content widgets allow for easy connection to your brand’s social media platforms.
Which newspaper theme is right for you?
While there are some amazing themes featured in this collection, I want to call special attention to two down here.
Mission News is the only free theme here and already works great for thousands of live news websites. Give it a try if you’re looking for a classic newspaper style.
Also, Extra is an important theme to consider since it has a modern design and extreme customization options. It’s powered by the Divi Builder, which makes it so flexible.
There are loads of other great WordPress newspaper themes listed here, but those are the top two that I wanted to call out.
Thanks for reading, and best of luck on your search for your new theme!
