15+ Best Free WordPress Magazine Themes for News & Blog Websites

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 is 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.

Free WordPress themes for news websites and blogs 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.

The plugin you’ll definitely need for a blog or magazine theme is the AMP plugin for WordPress.

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?

1. 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.
2. A great vista for visitor’s 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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 the free WordPress magazine themes.

Top 15+ Free WordPress Magazine Themes 2023

Colormag

Colormag is one of the most popular magazine-styled themes which is also suitable for news and blogging sites. This theme comes with a beautiful magazine-style 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.

Colormag integrates more than 600 Google fonts so select the font that suits your website type along with multiple color options that allow you to customize your website as you desire. In addition, this theme also has a footer editor option in which you can change the footer information and design. This theme is fully compatible with multiple browsers and the WPML plugin that 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.

Avior

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 theme 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 menus integration).

Key features:

• Very flexible navigation menus
• Clean responsive design
• Several page templates (with and without sidebar)
• Ready-made shop design (WooCommerce).

Viral News WordPress Theme

If you are looking for a flexible WordPress theme to create your online news magazine website, Viral News can be a decent choice. It comes with 6 predesigned demos that can be imported and installed in one click. These demos are carefully crafted and contain a professional look and engaging content to keep your visitors for a longer period of time. Additionally, the theme is fully integrated with Elementor Page Builder to easily create any pages using the drag and drop process.

Viral News is an all-in-one 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 theme 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

11+ Best WordPress News Plugins for Your Website: Free & Paid

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Landing Page WordPress Theme for BundleStore

This 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 by MasterBundles 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

Madd Magazine

Madd Magazine is a fully responsive WordPress theme for news, magazines, or blogs 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, SEO optimized with Google fonts, colors 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.

Cenote

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 theme yourself as it is packed with customizable features like boxed and wide layouts and primary color options.

This is a fully responsive 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 theme that can provide more functionality to your website. This theme 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.

VMagazine Lite

Vmagazine template allows you to create a blog or online newspaper of different kinds and topics effortlessly. Pre-made Tech, Fashion, Gaming, and multipurpose World Mag demos give you a quick understanding of what exactly layout will suit best to your needs. Integrated drag and drop SiteOrigin page builder enables us to customize this WordPress blog template without coding.

News ticker, featured, and recent posts sliders are available for proper exposure of important data and breaking news. By allowing placing ads in any area of your site the theme provides tools for website monetization and lets users enjoy your content from any device thanks to a fully responsive design. Vmagazine theme is 100% compatible with WPML and Polylang plugins for further translation of the template into any language.

Key features:

• 8 custom widgets
• Ajax live search
• Unlimited color options
• WooCommerce integration
• Optimized for speed and SEO
• One click demo import

FlyMag

FlyMag got a nifty design with lots of white space and quite a catchy structure for different types of blogs and magazines. It offers a functional WordPress sidebar, which you may turn into a powerful helper of tags, categories, search bar, and even media content. The theme is easily customizable to fit the needs of news websites as well as the personal blogs of active people.

If you are really interested in this theme and got a minute, you can even register for a free demo to take a look at the backend tools.

Key features:

• Fully responsive design
• Rich theme options panel
• Great widgetized areas
• Validated theme code
• Awesome transition effects
• Customizable site identity.

Silk Lite

Silk Lite is built by WordPress blog themes experts – Pixelgrade. These guys know everything about aspiring design and content-rich WordPress websites giving real strength even to their free WordPress magazine themes like Silk.

The theme 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 theme offers you delicate typography and a memorable front-page layout.

Key features:

• Stylish design
• Easy social integration
• Mobile-ready
• Stunning animation effects.

TrendMag

This super-crisp theme comes with lots of white space and perfect grid & list hierarchy for news and galleries, smooth animation effects, and smart banner areas for ads.

Thanks to extra useful features like a live stream, video channel,s and galleries you can create a fully functional website for a serious online magazine establishment. In case you also sell something, TrendMag is already packaged with a ready-made shop design.

Key features:

• Perfect for fashion blogs
• Unlimited sidebars for complex blog structures
• Real-time editing in WordPress Customizer.

MH Magazine Lite

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 blocks 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.

Story Magazine

Story Magazine offers you an awesome space to share your stories in a classic way – with news and main articles blocks. A perfect hierarchy of content blocks and lots of white space will help you establish yourself as a professional brand in the field. If you upgrade to the Pro version, you’ll unlock unlimited customization possibilities.

Key features:

• Basic SEO markup & additional SEO plugin
• Eye-catching, structured front page
• Customizable colors

Mission News

Mission News is a great free magazine WordPress theme by the WordPress developer and educator Ben Sibley. You’ll enjoy a thought-out classic design of Mission News. The theme 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 details (New York Times style)
• Delicate typography
• Easy setup & tutorials.

Magazine Elite

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 and news, a Pinterest-style blog, lots of widgets for media files and other content blocks.

The 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 theme.

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.

Envo Magazine

This theme catches your attention with a nice combination of clutter-free and sophisticated design. Envo Magazine is fully widgetized allowing you to construct your news website the way you want and present your content in different ways. The theme is suitable for newspapers, magazines, creative blogs, editors, news portals, and similar websites. The theme is regularly updated and is used on multiple websites.

Key features:

• Fully responsive
• Creative design solutions
• Advertising spots.

NewsMag

NewsMag is a widely used free WordPress magazine theme for a variety of blogs. The theme features perfect on-balance layouts, bold headlines, and different categorized news sections. A free 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 the 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.

Pencil

Pencil is a nice minimalist WordPress theme for blogs and news 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.

Elanza Lite

Elanza is a free WordPress theme for magazines as well as personal blogs. It’s very easy on customization since it allows you to add posts in different styles, order sections with drag and drop, feature breaking news in a slider, customize different multipurpose widgets and easily style theme elements.

Key features:

• Standard and grid layout blog templates
• Google fonts
• Adsense widget
• Element styling options
• Custom widgets (About me, Social media and more)
• Fullwidth and grid layouts
• Compatible with major WordPress plugins.

Echo Magazine

Echo free WordPress magazine theme 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.

Hopefully, in the 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.