By The following roundup will show you the top 21 themes for your magazine-style website. Each of the items on the list is specifically chosen because of its design, features, and clean code and can do a lot for the looks of your WordPress site and blog.
If you’re looking for a change or are tired of using the themes given in the free directory, then one of the magazine themes below will be the right one for you.
What the Right WordPress Theme Can Do for You
Many site owners and bloggers wish to turn their platforms into beautiful, professional-looking, and stylish magazines, with not just a great homepage but also to have every little detail from the posts, footer and header, menus, images, and formatting in order.
Some decide to hire web designers and pay a fortune, while others try to code it themselves. In both cases, they are investing more than they need to.
All that can be done by installing and activating the right magazine theme on your WordPress site. As with anything else in the open-source system, this too is a matter of a few clicks and you’ll have a brand new look for your website.
What’s more, premium themes (or paid ones) can go a long way in helping you optimize your website, boost performance, and enhance the user experience.
What to Look for in a Great Magazine Theme
The theme you choose to have for your WordPress site will be a key element of your brand image. That means it should offer great fonts and colors, visuals and options to play with, so you can set it up in a way that corresponds to your brand.
You want a theme that’s created by a reputable source, coded well, and kept up-to-date. We take these into consideration when choosing the right magazine themes to include in our roundup.
Last but not least, you want it to be with responsive design, as mobile web browsing overtook desktop a long time ago.
The features of themes vary, and that’s what will help you choose the best one for you and your goals. Think about the following questions.
- What do you want your site to be able to do?
- Will you focus on news or just standard articles?
- Are images or video going to be the main type of content you present?
- Are you looking for a more minimalist look, or just the opposite, bright colors and a lot of images?
- Will many widgets and the possibility to arrange them how you like interest you?
- Are you going to include banners on your homepage?
- What’s the feeling you want to instill in a first-time visitor?
All these and more, are questions you need to answer now so you can understand your requirements for a magazine theme. Once you have a list of items you want it to have, you can check out the list below with the best WordPress magazine themes:
The Best WordPress Magazine Themes for 2022
1. The Essence
If you’re a creative, have an audience of mostly females, or are looking for a clean design for your blog that’s also inspirational, then The Essence by Meridian Themes is the right magazine theme for your website.
It’s highly responsive and as you can see in the image above, looks great on all devices.
The blog layout you see, though, is just one of the 17 that you can choose from. Because social sharing is so important in the blogging world and people want to tell their friends on social media what they saw or just read, this option comes built-in with The Essence.
2. Wonderwall
The second magazine theme in our roundup is the stylish and flexible Wonderwall created for lifestyle bloggers. It’s perfect for those of you who want to run a magazine, display banners, and have a newsletter.
There are many homepage layouts you can choose from, and the built-in newsletter can be added to your footer or put in the sidebar. It will prompt visitors to subscribe to your list and will look as stylish as any other element from the page.
This magazine theme, like all other by Meridian Themes, is easy to set up and highly customizable, and you can expect high performance and great support. If you think Wonderwall is the theme for you, then learn more about it here.
3. Florentine
Are you a food blogger wanting to present all your recipes in the most effective and beautiful way?
Then Florentine is the theme for you.
Regardless of what device people will use to land on your website, this theme will help your content be responsive and easy to consume. There’s a custom post option that will organize your recipes and add formatting.
The only thing you need to do is enter the information. And because foodies will be prepping their meals while still on your website to see the next steps, this theme supports a distraction-free viewer. Once they enjoy a recipe of yours, they will also be able to join your newsletter, that will be included in the theme without the need to install another plugin.
4. Hive
Hive is a clean magazine-style theme by Pixelgrade. It offers a smart but flexible layout that can be customized easily.
One of its main features is its unique typography elements. You can create drop caps to make your content stand out. You can also use columns and highlights. Plus, it has a good range of color palettes and fonts for you to choose from.
On top of all of that, Hive works well with the Gutenberg block editor, so you can create pages and posts easily. Once you know what style you want, Hive helps you to make your content pop. Readers will enjoy the unique look that Hive will automatically add to your website.
5. Journo
Journo is a magazine and blog WordPress theme that covers all the corners, whether you need to have them covered or not. Need social media integration? Check. How about newsletter pop-up support? Check. It has a variety of blog lists and sliders to help you start? Check.
Journo is a premium WordPress theme developed to give magazine and high-end blog website all the tools and options they need to thrive in their fields. Whether it’s a limitless choice of header styles, a great online store, and ad positioning options, this is a WordPress theme you’ll want with you on your way to publishing stardom.
6. Newsmag
The next product by Theme Forest is Newsmag, the complete solution for almost any magazine site and blog. It’s optimized perfectly and is most suitable for newspapers and magazines, reviews sites, and anyone presenting a lot of content in a responsive and modern manner.
Some of its unique features include YouTube videos support, rating system, and AdSense integeration.
The customization happens on the front end with a drag-and-drop page builder and you can choose from more than 100 handcrafted elements. The user experience is complemented by a smart ad system and sidebar, custom-made lightbox, video playlists, and a smart list showing your articles.
7. Strollik
Do you have one product to sell that you want to present as well as possible to potential buyers?
Strollik is a dedicated WooCommerce theme that offers you 10 unique pre-built templates and a 360 Product View that turns your product into an interactive experience for the visitor.
8. Felt
Felt is a modern style WordPress theme that gives readers a simple to use platform. Besides the usual features you get with a magazine theme, Felt also includes a carousel and slideshow widget. With that, you can showcase your most important or newest content.
The included Style Manager can be used in the WordPress Customizer to easily choose the colors and other features you want on your website. It comes with custom palettes, or you can make up your own.
You can integrate it with WooCommerce, so you can have an online store in the same look as the rest of your website. There’s also a dedicated widget for displaying ads.
Lastly, Felt is compatible with the Gutenberg block editor, which means you can build and edit your pages and posts exactly how you want them.
9. Click Mag
If you’re planning to create a viral news or magazine blog, then you might be interested in the great design and options of Click Mag by ThemeForest.
Its main goals are to keep visitors coming back to your site and maximize clicks. It integrates perfectly with WooCommerce and your online store will become highly responsive and with beautiful design too.
There are additional elements that will make your content stand out and boost your brand, such as a post slider, reviewer plugin, sticky sidebar, continue reading button, and many more.
10. Grand Magazine
Another viral blog and newspaper theme for WordPress is Grand Magazine. With it, you get more than 40 predesigned layouts for your blog and posts. If you’re running a magazine website, you know that visitors want to see what’s hot and trending and what other people are enjoying.
This theme does exactly that by showing readers which posts have the most shares, views and comments.
The live preview is rich in options, with more than 300 elements to choose from to customize your blog.
11. Essence Pro
This magazine theme is great if you’re after a clutter-free site. Essence Pro is a Genesis theme by StudioPress that offers a simple layout and design for your readers, which also makes it a pleasant theme to edit. Its beautiful style is well suited to magazines in the health and lifestyle niche, though that doesn’t mean you can’t use it for another industry.
Essence Pro has advanced Gutenberg support and is AMP ready to make sure your website runs fast and smoothly. It also has eCommerce features and is compatible with WooCommerce.
You can also create an email opt-in or other forms as it’s optimized for WPForms. On top of that, it includes the Genesis eNews Extended plugin, which integrates with email marketing services, such as MailChimp and AWeber.
12. MagPlus
MagPlus offers you a ton of unique elements to choose from. Customizing and building the site of your dreams is easy with the visual composer, live customizer, and style editor.
It goes together with 40 stunning templates, each of which feels like a different magazine theme. In addition to that, MagPlus is made for speed and efficiency. It’s 100% responsive, supports WooCommerce, AdSense, and AMP.
13. Venus
Venus is a magazine theme that’s retina and translation ready, includes instant AJAX search and responsive design, and goes together with a review plugin and online shop support.
Its clean and minimal design is great for any type of blog, newspaper or magazine website that focuses on content and striking images.
14. The Voux
The Voux is stylish, lightweight and professional, and that’s why brands prefer it. If your site also has an online store, you can benefit from the full WooCommerce support that comes with a few shop pages.
The article layouts answer all your needs and even change along with the content on them.The social sharing experience using The Voux is complete, and you can have infinite scrolling to make the reading experience smooth.
15. PantoGraph
PantoGraph relies mainly on shortcodes (more than 50 of them) and different headers, footers, sidebars and more, to help you create one-of-a-kind magazine site with as many looks for pages as you like.
You can choose from more than 32 post blocks and 10 category templates. Enjoy widgets for video, subscribers, social sharing, and popular posts. Additionally, you get a mega menu that’s pretty easy to use and AJAX pagination and load more buttons.
16. MiniMag
MiniMag is one of those multipurpose themes that can do what you like them to do. This one, however, is super stylish and built for readability. It’s powerful and yet clean, and with an admin panel and theme options.
Check out the 11 unique homepage its creators have prepared for you, and get access to the premium plugins Slider Revolution and Visual Composer.
17. WorldNews
Next on the list of magazine themes is WorldNews, RTL and WooCommerce ready, with unlimited colors and multi menu style. You can choose your grid mode to be with 1 to 6 columns, create your own sidebar and shop style lists.
Moreover, you’ll get a ton of features including a Master Animation element, sticky menu, flat design style, live search, etc.
18. Mag
Mag is what we can call the all-in-one solution for magazines. It’s for bold brands and publications that have a message to share and who’ll make the most of its functionality and flexibility.
Add to that its speed, safety, optimization, and plenty of extensions to fit your vision for the blog.
19. GDN
Last but not least, before we finish this roundup of magazine themes for WordPress, we present to you GDN, or G’day News. It’s an innovative concept that – according to the words of its creators – is designed for the publisher and created for the reader.
Check out its 13 unique demos to find the one that looks like the magazine you have in mind. Whether you’re looking to publish a Lifestyle magazine, want to have a business site or newspaper, or to run a big publication in Tech or Fashion, GDN can be its foundation.
Conclusion
We hope you enjoyed our roundup of the 21 best WordPress magazine themes, and are sure that the right one for you is among them.
You may also want to check out article on best WordPress landing plugins & tools.
