26 Best WordPress Magazine Themes of 2021 [FREE + PAID]

Are you looking for the best WordPress magazine themes for your website?

Content-rich websites need different layouts that can help them show both new and important content prominently. WordPress magazine themes are designed to do just that.

In this article, we’ll share some of the best WordPress magazine themes that will help your content shine.

Getting Started with a WordPress Magazine Website

WordPress is the best website builder for building a magazine site. It currently powers over 39% of all websites on the internet.

If you want to make a magazine website with WordPress, then you will need web hosting and a domain name. A domain name is your site’s address on the web, like wpbeginner.com or google.com. Web hosting is the storage for all your website files.

Magazine websites often have a lot of content, including images and videos. This is why you need to choose a WordPress hosting company that offers you enough space to upload all your files while also handling your traffic efficiently.

If you are just starting out, then we recommend Bluehost. They are the most popular hosting company and an official WordPress.org recommended hosting provider.

They are offering WPBeginner readers a huge discount on hosting, plus a free domain name and free SSL certificate.

For complete step by step instructions, see our guide on how to start a WordPress blog.

If you have high traffic, then we would recommend going with WP Engine. It’s a managed WordPress hosting service, which means they will handle everything for you.

If you already have a WordPress site, you may simply want to switch to a magazine theme. Just take a look at our guide on how to install a WordPress theme for help getting your theme set up.

With that said, let’s take a look at some of the best WordPress magazine themes that you can use on your site.

1. Divi

Divi is a popular WordPress theme designed to create any website. It comes with a built-in page builder and dozens of ready-made layouts, including multiple templates for online magazines.

It features custom design elements, color schemes, background options, and more. It also includes SEO optimization to help rank your website in search engines.

2. Astra

Astra is one of the best WordPress multipurpose themes on the market. It comes with several ready-to-launch starter websites that you can install and customize to suit you.

Astra works great with any WordPress page builder plugin and comes with tons of flexible options. You can customize your theme using the live customizer or by simply editing a page in the default WordPress editor.

3. Magazine Pro

Magazine Pro is a powerful modern WordPress magazine theme from StudioPress. It features customizable headers and comes ready for WooCommerce.

It also includes an easy-to-set-up widgetized homepage, multiple page layouts, and additional options in the live theme customizer.

StudioPress is now part of WP Engine, the most popular managed WordPress hosting company. You can get this theme and all 35+ other StudioPress themes when you sign up for WP Engine hosting to build your website.

Bonus: WPBeginner users also get an additional 20% OFF. Get started with WP Engine today!

4. OceanWP

OceanWP is a free WordPress multipurpose theme. It ships with dozens of pre-built sites and a 1-click content importer to get started quickly.

With eCommerce integration, it allows you to sell merchandise and make money online. The theme is translation ready and supports RTL languages out of the box.

5. Ultra

Ultra is a stunning WordPress theme with a multipurpose approach to easily make a magazine or newspaper website. It offers fully customizable demo sites and a built-in page builder for customization.

Ultra’s other notable features include premium addons, color schemes, layout options, parallax scrolling, and more. It has image filters to make a great first impression on your users.

6. Guten Theme

Guten Theme is a stylish WordPress magazine theme designed for the WordPress block editor. It comes with multiple built-in layouts for header, footer, and blog.

Guten Theme supports additional Gutenberg blocks, allowing you to create impressive content layouts for your posts and pages easily. It has custom colors and font settings with flexible templates.

7. Tribune

Tribune is a powerful WordPress news and magazine theme with an elegant layout featuring your most important content. It has a featured posts area at the top and a carousel slider at the bottom of the page.

Among other features, it offers a slider, a video widget, WordPress live customizer settings, tabbed widgets, infinite scroll, social media integration, and quick setup.

8. Hestia Pro

Hestia Pro is an excellent WordPress multi-purpose theme for news and magazine websites. It comes with a fully customizable homepage with a featured content slider, a dynamic homepage builder, featured categories, and a 1-click demo content installer.

It has multiple page templates, custom colors, fonts, logo, and background options. The theme also comes with several custom widgets and multiple widget-ready areas.

9. Wonderwall

Wonderwall is a beautifully designed WordPress magazine theme. It includes 9 pre-made homepage layouts that allow you to choose from different grids, featured posts, single lists, and more.

Inside, you’ll also find custom widgets for social media profiles, Instagram, and content discovery features. It also offers dedicated positions to display banner ads across your website.

10. Felt

Felt is an elegant WordPress magazine theme with a ton of awesome features. It’s designed to beautifully display content in a magazine layout.

Felt pays special attention to readability across devices and looks equally great on mobile and desktop. It has a fullscreen featured content slider to showcase your content categories beautifully.

11. HitMag

HitMag is a free WordPress news and magazine theme. It comes with a featured content slider on top with a right sidebar and dual navigation menu.

HitMag has a featured categories section, an ad placement area, a trending widget, and more. The theme set up is easy with a 1-click demo content importer, which you can then replace with your own content.

12. The Essence

The Essence is an elegant WordPress magazine theme suitable for lifestyle, fashion, entertainment, and similar websites. It includes 4 different layout choices for your article pages, and a built-in social sharing feature with a floating sidebar to easily share articles from your website.

Inside you will also find custom widgets for Instagram and social profiles. The Essence comes with a pain-free setup process allowing you to easily get started using the live customizer.

13. News Pro

News Pro is designed for WordPress news and magazine websites. It’s a fast, high-performing theme that gives you a solid foundation to build content-rich websites.

It comes with 2 sidebars, a footer widget area, a customizable header, a simple navigation menu, and beautiful typography.

14. Hueman

Hueman is a classic WordPress magazine theme designed to showcase your content with elegance. It comes with a featured content slider, dual navigation, left and right sidebars, a featured categories area, and multiple ad spaces.

Other notable features include a custom logo, social media icons, page layouts, and several widget-ready areas. You can use the WordPress live customizer to easily make changes on your website.

15. Public Opinion

Public Opinion is a sleek and modern WordPress magazine theme. It comes in a light color scheme and a flexible homepage layout that you can easily customize using widgets.

It has content sliders, featured categories, advertising space, multiple category layouts, and more. It’s optimized for speed and performance and looks equally great on mobile devices.

16. NewsCard

NewsCard is a stylish WordPress magazine theme suitable for technology, gaming, fashion, travel, health, and other niches. It comes with bold colors that make your content more readable.

The theme has a top story ticker to showcase trending stories on the top. It also allows you to organize your content by categories and create a more engaging layout.

17. OriginMag

OriginMag is a magazine WordPress theme with eCommerce support. It’s fully compatible with WooCommerce and perfect for news and magazine sites that sell merchandise.

OriginMag takes a minimalist approach to design and focuses more on the readability of your content. The homepage is dynamically built with featured content, featured categories, and your latest articles.

18. Metro Magazine

Metro Magazine is a free WordPress theme designed for online news and magazine websites. It has multiple color schemes, color labels for categories, custom widgets, social media integration, and multiple page templates.

The theme has 2 navigation menus, widget areas, ad placement, and live customizer support. It offers a very modern user interface with a focus on images and typography.

19. Patch

Patch is a masonry-style WordPress blogging and magazine theme featuring a minimalist layout that makes your content pop out. It comes with multiple layout choices, including a grid layout for your homepage.

It’s easy to use and quick to set up, with lots of flexible options to customize every aspect of your website. It’s also translation-ready using a plugin such as WPML.

20. ColorMag

ColorMag is a sophisticated WordPress magazine theme. It comes with a featured content slider, custom widgets, and custom header support.

With color choices and custom backgrounds, ColorMag lets you fully change the look and feel of your magazine website. It also supports WooCommerce straight out of the box.

Related: BigCommerce vs WooCommerce – Which one is better?

21. Domino Magazine

Domino Magazine is a highly customizable WordPress magazine theme. The homepage features multiple widgetized areas and a dynamic page builder.

It comes with a built-in news ticker, weather widget, and a tabbed widget. The theme also allows you to easily add a custom background, headers, sliders, and your logo.

22. Responz

Responz is a 3-column news and magazine theme for WordPress. It features an elegant design with great typography and a fully responsive layout.

It comes with multiple layout options like 2 sidebars, 1 sidebar, or a full-width homepage. You can also choose from the list view or grid view post layouts.

23. Metro Pro

Metro Pro is a powerful WordPress magazine theme that features a custom background with large featured images.

It comes with an easy-to-set-up homepage with sections for your featured stories. It also includes built-in social media integration, custom menus, custom widgets, and a theme options panel.

24. News Portal

News Portal is a beautifully designed WordPress magazine and news theme. It comes with multiple color schemes and options to choose colors for your category pages.

For easier customization, it includes dozens of theme options. These are all accessible through the live customizer. News Portal is tested with all popular WordPress plugins and optimized for better speed, performance, and SEO.

25. Royal Magazine

Royal Magazine is a beautiful free WordPress magazine theme suitable for newspapers, magazines, and personal blogs. It comes with a magazine-style homepage layout, which is easy to set up using the live theme customizer.

This responsive theme comes with multiple navigation menus, sidebars, color options, and page templates. It also works great with popular page builders and top WordPress plugins.

26. Magazine

Magazine is a powerful WordPress theme with tons of amazing features. It comes with 42 layout choices, a layout builder, a featured content slider, sliding menus, a mega menu on top, social sharing, related posts, and many more features.

It also features six color schemes, multiple sidebars, custom widgets, icon fonts, and lots of shortcodes.

We hope this article helped you find the best WordPress magazine themes for your website. You may also want to see our guide on the best email marketing services to stay in touch with readers and grow your magazine’s readership.

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