WordPress is an excellent platform for creating a magazine website. Nowadays theme developers developed and designed a comprehensive list of the best magazine WordPress themes in 2019. These themes are well suited for news portals, tech blogs, gaming websites, fashion blogs, gossip, and any other topic.
A good number of popular news and magazine sites – such as CNN, Variety, Fortune, BBC America, The New York Times, Quartz, Reuters, and TechCrunch – use WordPress to develop their beautiful websites.
Below we’ve compiled a list of 30 of the best magazine WordPress themes to help you create a powerful and unique site for whatever niche you’re in.
All the themes listed below are premium themes with fully responsive and pixel perfect design and highly customizable. Most of them offer a variety of color options, fonts, widgets, and great plugins. Perhaps most importantly, they are easy to set up and customize.
Check them out! We hope you find the perfect theme to create the next big magazine site. You may also like these Free Commercial Clean Minimalistic Typographic WordPress themes.
I tried to include the highest-rated, best-selling and themes that are destined to succeed. If you feel that some themes are missing, please leave a comment below and I will list it on this list.
GoMedia Magazine WordPress Theme
GoMedia is a clean and well-organized magazine theme perfect for news websites, personal or community blogs.
The featured posts slider works great on your homepage and can display your most important or up-to-date articles for your guests to read. Choose from three post formatting options to add content via images, a gallery or video.
This theme comes complete with six custom widgets; Feedburner, Twitter, Flickr and more. The ad management feature will enable you to place various sizes of banner images on your sidebar, as well as add banners to other built-in ad positions with ease.
GoMedia was built using Twitter Bootstrap, a popular front-end framework. It has a fully responsive design and is cross-browser compatible. There is also localization support enabling you to reach a multilingual audience.
Price: $49 (Lifetime Membership)
Novelty Magazine WordPress Theme
Novelty by Tesla Themes is a modern design that’s fitting for news, sports or any other type of magazine content. Some of its top features include an image slider, tabbed widgets, featured posts, custom shortcodes, custom posts, social media integration, and a responsive design.
Powered by the Tesla framework, this theme makes it easy for you to set up and customize your site to match the look and functionality you want, without the need for a lot of technical knowledge. The theme’s demo showcases a “hot news” scrolling ticker on the homepage, which adds a piece of breaking news feel to the site.
Braxton – Premium WordPress Magazine Theme
Braxton is a fully responsive magazine theme from ThemeForest that includes impressive fly-out mobile navigation and four different ad units. According to the theme’s sales page, it was named one of the top 10 best-paid WordPress themes in 2013 by Forbes.com. It’s easy to see why, with the theme’s beautiful design and functionality.
Braxton’s headline fonts look like they were taken right off today’s magazine covers and the theme’s content organization mimics a table of contents. Braxton would make a great theme for a fashion or entertainment type of site. On the functionality side, this theme comes WooCommerce and bbPress ready and features infinite scrolling, lazy loading, and sticky menu bar.
MagXP Ultimate Magazine WordPress Theme
The MagXP responsive magazine theme by MyThemeShop comes with four homepage layouts and two single post layouts. The theme is WooCommerce ready if you’re interested in any eCommerce functionality. Depending on your content focus, you may be interested in the integrated review system that lets visitors add ratings and reviews to your posts and pages. This is a great option because these ratings will also show up in search results.
MagXP’s drag-and-drop homepage builder and unlimited sidebar options give you a tremendous amount of flexibility to adapt the theme to your unique needs. If you’re unsure of the layout you want, the theme includes demo content to fit several uses including entertainment, health, sports and more.
Price: $59 (use the coupon code ‘freetopremium‘ to receive a 30% discount)
Demo | Purchase
Magazine – Magazine WordPress Themes
Magazine by Themify is a three-column responsive and retina ready theme with a lot of features. It has an impressive 42 pre-built layout options, mobile slide navigation, Mega Menus, widgetized areas for banner ads, icon fonts, social share buttons and more.
The homepage showcases a breaking news ticker that draws attention to important stories. Visitors can pause or advance the ticker as they want. Magazine comes with six color skins built-in, but you can also change the appearance of the site within the admin’s styling panel. While the content alignment on the homepage is a little all over the place, it certainly gives you several ways to group and break up different types of content.
Price: $59 (Buy 1 Get 1 FREE)
Demo | Purchase
SimpleMag – Magazine Theme for Creative Stuff
SimpleMag is a clean and minimal responsive magazine theme that puts focus on your content. Setting it up is easy, with a simple drag-and-drop page composer and configurable drop-down Mega Menu. For mobile devices, SimpleMag has an off-canvas navigation and sidebar to make the mobile experience even better.
With this theme, you can layout each category differently. You can include the slider, have two or three post columns or decide to show or hide the sidebar. SimpleMag has a built-in review system that lets visitors see a breakdown of your post content score. Finally, a self-configurable footer allows you to use one, two or three widget areas to include the content you need.
WP-Clear
WP-Clear is a responsive magazine theme that includes optional banner advertising areas and a lot of options for content grouping. Some of the areas on the homepage are even reminiscent of CNN’s website.
Whether you have news or general magazine site, WP-Clear gives you multimedia options with its featured sliders for pages, photos, and videos. There’s a YouTube videos page template and a built-in author page if you plan on having multiple authors on your site.
This theme gives you a variety of customization options, with page layouts that can be set up with wide or narrow sidebars in and different combinations. It also includes several page templates, such as an alternate homepage layout, four different blog layout styles, a portfolio page, a sales letter, and a tabbed archives page.
Price: $59 (Get 30% off on Lifetime Membership with the coupon code ‘4111D0‘)
Demo | Purchase
Marroco – WordPress Magazine Theme
Marroco is an attractive magazine-style WordPress theme with lots of cool capabilities. Slick, smooth, and filled to the brim with white space, visitors who stumble upon a website running on Marroco will not be disappointed they came. The design is very light, using white as the primary background color, which is complemented perfectly by the black medium-sized typography.
A drag and drop content builder, 300+ Google Fonts, and a built-in review system feature in this theme. Functionality for related content display and demo content are also integrated with Marroco, as are smooth scroll, image lazy load, and image hover animation effects.
Presso – Modern Magazine / Newspaper / Viral Theme
Presso is a bold responsive theme that aims to make a big impression. Chunky headlines and divider lines give it a definite newspaper feel, while the large images make it seem like a music or entertainment magazine.
This theme has a bunch of powerful features that make it a good option for both small publications and large ones. It comes WooCommerce and bbPress ready and includes an integrated review system. Impressive Mega Menus include images and video, and the theme’s instant search functionality displays search results while typing. In addition to standard customization options, Presso includes three site layouts, two header layouts, and integrated advertising units.
WP-DaVinci
WP-DaVinci is a flexible responsive theme by Solostream that can be used for many different content needs. While it can accommodate the needs of a large magazine site, the theme could also be used for a personal or business website.
You can choose from one of five different built-in layout styles, or use the theme settings page to customize everything from basic options to navigation, advertisements and subscription forms. WP-DaVinci also lets you get creative with a wealth of slider options. You can showcase featured pages, photos, and videos or use a featured articles slider in either narrow or wide format.
Price: $59 (Get 30% off on Lifetime Membership with the coupon code ‘4111D0‘)
Demo | Purchase
Sparkle – Outstanding Magazine theme for WordPress
Sparkle is another smooth magazine theme with an elegant design that thrives on light coloring and plenty of white space. Sparkle comes with more than its fair share of nifty design elements and cool features. To start with, its navigation has mega menu capability and a neat design (plus, you also have the option to display the menu off-canvas). On the home page, the category of each featured post is easily understood courtesy of the highlighted tag that’s appended to the post’s thumbnail.
Sparkle comes with plenty of screencasts to help you start configuring the theme. You get a rating system, the $25 Visual Composer plugin included in the purchase package free of charge, and multiple post formats for your magazine.
SmartMag – Responsive & Retina WordPress Magazine
SmartMag is a slick magazine-style theme with a clean and organized layout. It’s responsive and retina ready and comes with multiple blog layouts built-in.
The theme’s drag-and-drop page builder and simple demo importer make it easy for you to get your site up and running in no time. If you want to use background images with your theme, you can select your site to display in boxed layout or choose the full-width layout if you don’t want a background image. For those of you who want to incorporate reviews into your site, SmartMag includes a review system that can either use percentages or points to represent ratings.
Tempest– Magazine WordPress Theme
If you’re looking for a magazine theme that has a more fashion-forward look, then Tempest is one to look at. Different than many of the other magazine themes, it doesn’t feature a large masthead or logo area but instead integrates the logo and navigation in the middle of a full-page image on the homepage.
You can scroll down vertically to access featured homepage content, such as blog posts, WooCommerce products, videos or author bios. Tempest includes four custom post types, including video, galleries, portfolio, and slideshow. The theme’s powerful admin lets you create an infinite number of layouts using its shortcode plugin. This would make a great theme option for a fashion or design site, as well as a personal portfolio.
Magazine Pro
The Magazine Pro theme by StudioPress is a mobile responsive, fixed-width theme that’s ideal for anyone looking for an easy-to-use publishing platform. Built on the powerful Genesis framework, it has a very clean and minimal design, simple black-and-white styling and a single accent color.
The theme comes with four accent color options, including blue, green, orange and red. Magazine Pro also has six layout choices that let you specify content and sidebar location as well as the ability to use full-width content. The theme is media-ready and gives you the ability to set featured images for your posts as well as a featured story on the homepage. They’ve also thought ahead and included optional ad locations for users who want to feature advertising on their site.
Price: $99.95 (Includes Framework)
Demo | Purchase
Realnews – Stylish and Responsive Magazine Theme
Realnews is a stunning black-and-white magazine theme that’s attention-grabbing but doesn’t take the focus away from the content. It’s a responsive magazine theme that includes a homepage slider, so you can feature your top stories prominently.
It includes Visual Composer, which lets you easily create complex layouts, as well as the Taqyeem Reviews widget. Realnews has several custom widgets built-in for video, Twitter, tabs, social counter, and search. Unlimited sidebar functionality lets you set up different sidebar options for each post and page if you choose. You also have four post formats to choose from standard, audio, video, and gallery.
Immunity
MyThemeShop has taken a slightly different approach with its Immunity theme. It comes with six different layout styles targeted at different types of business or content. So whether you want to set up a magazine site focused on health, weddings or just want a theme that would work as a blog, Immunity is up to the task.
In addition to being responsive and WooCommerce enabled, the theme has integrated social media and is optimized for Google Adsense. Once you choose the layout you like, you can further customize the theme with unlimited color schemes, background patterns, shortcodes, and 350+ icons.
Price: $59 (use the coupon code ‘athemes20off‘ to receive a 20% discount)
Demo | Purchase
Venus – News Magazine Blog WordPress
Venus has the privilege of being the first magazine theme on our list to feature parallax functionality. Responsive and retina-ready, this theme has a slick fashion-forward design that pairs large images with background videos to create a captivating presentation.
Venus has a drag-and-drop content builder and advanced theme admin panel that lets you take control of your design and content without touching any code. Some of the theme’s advanced functionality comes from built-in tools such as WooCommerce, Taqyeem, instant Ajax search and a breaking news ticker. Venus is the type of theme that can work well for a variety of uses. It would make a gorgeous corporate, creative agency or portfolio site.
Ciola – Premium Responsive WordPress Magazine
Ciola is a responsive magazine theme by ThemeForest that has an interesting grid layout. Featured stories at the top of the page are given large image treatments and have nice hover animations. The theme has a modern design that would work great with fashion, art or even video game sites.
It includes five blog styles, unlimited colors and five different featured image styles. The homepage is set up with a unique module layout so you can combine with grids, 50% width, sliders, and 100% width content.
Ciola’s integrated review system includes three different styles, placement options, pros and cons and more. Overall this is a truly feature-rich theme you’ll want to check out for yourself.
Fearless – Bold, Modern, & Responsive Multipurpose Magazine
Packed with options, this theme includes five blog styles, seven theme layouts, 13 custom widgets, a responsive advertising system, and a live theme customizer. The integrated review system encourages site visitors to interact with your content and will give you an idea of what your visitors want more of.
Rush – WordPress Blog & Magazine Theme
Rush is a responsive theme that’s built to use either as a blog or as a magazine-style theme. It’s fully responsive and can be set up to display as a full-width site or boxed layout. You also have the choice to have a two-column or three-column layout. The three-column layout is a little on the busy side, so you may want to consider that before making your choice.
The latest news ticker at the top of the page is also a nice feature, but you want to balance that with the rest of your content to make sure you don’t have too much going on at once. Rush has a lot of possibilities and could be used for a variety of different publications. The theme includes a long list of custom widgets, shortcodes, and other options as well.
Splash
Splash is a stylish responsive magazine theme. It’s WooCommerce ready and includes a built-in review system. The theme’s powerful options panel lets you control everything from the logo to color schemes, ad management, fonts and more. Splash also includes a list of 350+ scalable vector icons to choose from.
A related posts module is built into the theme so you can display related posts with just one click. Shortcode options include buttons, lists, videos, columns, tab and toggled content, maps and more. Splash also comes with 12 custom widgets already installed, so you can get your site going right away without having to search for and load a bunch of plugins.
Exquisite – Ultimate Newspaper Theme
Billed on ThemeForest as the “ultimate newspaper theme,” Exquisite has the design and functionality to live up to its name. It’s the type of theme that you have to experience to appreciate. At first glance, you notice that the homepage accommodates a lot of content, but it’s organized in such a way that it doesn’t look too busy or overwhelming.
There are three different homepage styles to choose from, but all of them are equally lovely. If you plan on breaking your site content into multiple high-level categories, this theme gives you the ability to designate a different color for each category within the theme options. The drop-down Mega Menus are well-designed and also responsive, so they will display correctly across all devices. If that were not enough, Exquisite also includes a review system, weather forecast functionality, gallery page and more.
Neuton – WordPress News Magazine Theme
Neuton is a news and magazine theme by CSS Igniter that would make a great theme for travel, real estate or any other type of content where photography plays an important role.
The theme has a responsive design that includes what they call a “hero section” at the top of the homepage. This hero section features a group of posts and a bold grid layout. You could use this section to highlight your newest stories or feature a favorite from each content category. Located above that section is a trending topics area that you can use to promote your most discussed and viewed articles.
Allegro – Multipurpose News, Magazine Theme
Allegro is a responsive news and magazine theme that has the look of a prestigious global news organization. It uses the Orange-Themes visual page builder that has a visual drag-and-drop interface and lets you move content blocks to create your desired page layout.
Weather reporting functionality is included with the theme, and automatically detects the viewer’s country and city. For customization, there are several options including 25+ shortcodes, two optional sidebars, post category color styles, and unlimited color combinations. To help you get started quickly, the theme includes demo content in a QuickStart package that loads all the data you need to get your demo site started right away.
Report – News & Magazine Theme for WordPress
Report is a sophisticated responsive theme with a clean design and professional look. The theme comes with an easy-to-use page building tool called Layout Composer. It lets you drag and drop content types and columns to create pages that are as complex or simple as you want them to be.
If you want to just choose options and go rather than playing around with the Layout Composer, Report comes with six header layouts, two footer layouts and two post layouts built-in. Sevaral other tools are available that are built seamlessly into the site’s design. You can include reviews and rating functionality, that lets you specify one of three different rating formats. You can also create limitless contact forms via Contact Form 7 plugin integration.
NewsPlus – News and Magazine WordPress Theme
NewsPlus is an all-purpose responsive theme that’s packed with features. This theme is WooCommerce and BuddyPress ready and has a clean design that’s optimized for SEO and microformats.
Using Flex Slider, you can create a post and content sliders as well as post carousels. To maximize customization options, NewsPlus has an individual page and post option panels. There are six custom widgets built-in, including Flicker, social icons, recent posts, popular posts, custom categories, and mini folio. Social sharing options are also built-in for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest. To make installation and setup easy, the theme includes demo content in XML format as well as step-by-step documentation for installation and configuration.
Reporter, a Totally Tweakable WordPress News Theme
Described as being “totally tweakable,” the Reporter news theme is responsive and retina ready. This theme has a built-in drag-and-drop homepage builder that gives you complete control over the look of your site. If you want to add a little movement to your site, you can have a news ticker in your header or a featured news slider on the homepage.
Reporter comes with three pre-built header layout options and supports unlimited backgrounds and color schemes. The theme’s navigation area is designed with drop-down Mega Menus that are customizable to include whatever content you want to feature. Built-in shortcodes include alerts, buttons, labels, panels, pricing tables, progress bars, tooltips and more.
Orion Press – Retina and Responsive Magazine Theme
Orion Press is a responsive and retina-ready magazine theme that has a cutting-edge design with a ton of options. The theme comes packaged with premium tools Taqyeem Reviews and Visual Composer. With Visual Composer, you can drag and drop content modules to easily build pages.
But you may not even need to do that since Orion Press comes with seven pre-built homepage templates to choose from. Like some of the other themes on our list, this one includes support for optional ad banners. To accommodate different media, Orion Press lets you choose from video, audio, gallery and full-width single post types.
FlatNews – Responsive Magazine WordPress Theme
FlatNews is a responsive news and magazine theme with a flat design and three-column homepage layout. You can easily change the homepage look and layout through the theme’s builder tool, which lets you drag and drop widgets to set up your content areas.
FlatNews has an integrated auto thumbnail picker that makes adding videos even easier. Additionally, the theme is set up with SEO best practices in mind, with optimized heading and title tags and rich snippet support. The theme’s scrolling news ticker can display image thumbnails for each story, which is a nice touch.
Skoon – WordPress Magazine / News Theme
Rounding out our list of magazine themes is Skoon from ThemeForest. It’s a clean and well laid out responsive theme that would also work well for photographers and creative agencies.
Although the theme’s description is a little light on details, it does highlight that Skoon includes a custom CSS box, full-width page template and 10 color pickers for different sections of the theme. For post formats, you have the option to choose video, audio or gallery. Built-in widgets include video, popular posts, social networking, and Facebook. Skoon is Contact Form 7 ready and features both logo and favicon uploaders.
Thank you for visiting Pixel2Pixel Design and reading this article! We highly appreciate it! Now you might want to learn how to make a website using free WordPress themes.
Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, meaning that if you click on one of the links and purchase an item, we may receive a commission. All opinions, however, are our own and we do not accept payments for positive reviews.
Hi Suresh,
That’s a pretty nice themes collection – thank you. I would be pleased if you added our MH Magazine WordPress Theme to one of your next themes collections.
Thanks and cheers,
Aline