Best Magazines in 2021
WordPress is a superb platform for magazine sites. Many well-known news and magazine sites – such as Variety, BBC America, Quartz, Fortune, CNN, Reuters, The New York Times, and TechCrunch – use WordPress to achieve their powerful and beautiful designs.
Below we’ve compiled a list of 35 of the best WordPress magazine themes to help you create a powerful and unique site for whatever niche you’re in. All the themes listed below are fully responsive 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.
1. Newspaper
Finding a suitable user-friendly theme for your magazine website can be tough. Fortunately, Newspapers could be all you need for high-traffic websites, such as blogs and magazines, that frequently posts across multiple channels.
This best news and magazine WordPress theme currently has over 85,000 happy customers. Layouts can be created in two ways – either through the specially crafted tagDiv Composer page builder or with the Visual Composer plugin, which comes bundled with the theme. If you’d like to get your website up and running quickly, you can simply choose from over 80 unique pre-built demos. It’s just as easy for you to build a website with a Newspaper as it is for your visitors to browse through the finished product.
To tweak your design further, the built-in Theme Panel includes a plethora of options that enable you to fine-tune your site to your exact requirements. What’s more, the Newspaper includes several ways to monetize your site, and it’s also fully optimized for Google AdSense. If that’s not enough, it offers over 40 social media integrations – enabling you to share your posts on many platforms. Furthermore, Newspaper is a fast theme, flexible, and optimized for speed. With the new custom-tailored tagDiv AMP plugin the site’s pages turn into a simplified mobile version.
All in all, a Newspaper can be ideal for news-related websites with high traffic. It combines gorgeous elements with intuitive settings and will enable you to build almost any kind of online publication. It’s a theme you should check out today!
2. Zeen
In music, producers use high-frequency sounds to keep you hooked and listening to a particular song. In web design, on the other hand, keeping visitors glued to the page is often the job of micro-interactions and animations. With a theme like Zeen, you’ll get access to these in abundance.
This theme is primarily designed for magazine formats. There are many demo layouts on offer, however, encompassing the wide variety of niches that make up that style. Each one can be customized using the built-in Tipi Builder tool, and there are plenty of theme options accessible via a dedicated panel.
Zeen offers a plethora of additional features, such as MailChimp integration, AMP-compatible pages, and much more. Perhaps its best attribute is the aforementioned micro-interactions and animations. The way elements transition across the page is smooth, and no screen space goes unwasted. You could even consider them the equivalent of ‘leading lines’, as the eye has a tendency to follow wherever the page nudges it to go.
Overall, Zeen is a theme that’s likely to impress you. In fact, it reached 100 sales within the first 12 hours of going live, which is a ThemeForest record. Its quality is apparent, and we definitely recommend that you check it out further!
3. Extra
Extra is a stellar theme that utilizes drag-and-drop content building and stylish design for a great user experience, whether for an online magazine or other media website.
There are plenty of unique features in this theme to make it a solid choice for your website, especially if your focus is on media. Extra uses the advanced Divi Builder plugin as a fulcrum for creating layouts from your homepage to syndicated columns to image and video galleries and more. The spectrum for customization with this theme is vast; dozens of modules designed specially for media outlets give you plenty of options to build a website to your exact preferences.
There are over 40 unique content modules at your disposal, enabling you and your team to create standard news stories featuring text and accompanied by images or videos. If your website uses advertising as a platform for revenue, you can plug advertisements directly into your content stream rather than restricting ad placement to conventional locations on your page (such as sidebars or headers). Other extremely useful module options include call to action buttons to help boost subscriptions, ‘person’ modules that highlight key members of your editing team and/or regular contributors and slider modules that support parallax as well as video backgrounds for a jaw-dropping user navigation experience.
There are also modules developed to support e-commerce, corporate websites, SaaS subscription pages, and portfolio sections for creative professionals or agencies. In other words, Extra not only is a standout theme for media publications but is fully capable of being used as a theme for just about any type of website.
If you’d like to know more about this theme, you can read our in-depth Extra review here.
4. Newsmag
Newsmag is a user-friendly content-focused WordPress theme.
Designed for publishing content in a range of formats, Newsmag is both easy to read and easy to use. The Newsmag demos cover many different types of news and magazine websites, including travel, fashion, food, and of course, content covering general news and information. The classic blog demo also makes Newsmag a good choice for personal bloggers who are looking for a theme that’s packed with templates and features.
While WordPress makes it easy to add text and image-based content to your website, Newsmag has all the templates to ensure that that information is presented in the best possible way. This theme also has great YouTube support, so if you want to include content on your website that you or others have uploaded to that platform, it’s very easy with Newsmag.
Monetizing your site is straightforward with Newsmag. Thanks to supporting Google AdSense, you can quickly insert your ad code into the theme settings to start displaying this content around your website. You can also use other ad networks on your site, too, giving you lots of options for generating revenue from your online magazine.
As this is a very popular theme, that has generated lots of sales, it has a positive user rating that should give you some confidence when deciding to build your website with Newsmag. This theme has been updated many times as well, ensuring that the templates and other features are always up to date. Improvements over the years have included faster loading times, support for more third-party plugins, and an even more responsive design. Other features, like the integrated drag-and-drop page builder tool and the library of premium widgets, help to make Newsmag a competitive option in this category.
If you want to build a truly user-friendly content website, Newsmag could be the theme you’re looking for.
5. Independent
Despite what you may at first assume, this theme is not connected to the British newspaper of the same name. However, Independent does let you publish news, stories, articles, and more – no matter what your exact niche might be.
There are over 17 different demo templates included within Independent. Among the standard choices (such as magazine, food, and technology styles), you’ll also find options for newer industries such as video gaming and cryptocurrency. Of course, with the bundled WPBakery Page Builder plugin, you can create whatever layout suits your fancy.
When it comes to page layouts, the sky’s the limit. There are practically unlimited header styles to choose from, as well as page designs focused on helping you generate ad revenue. You can rest easy knowing that your site’s monetization strategy can be implemented via Independent.
Themes are always a personal choice, but when it comes to Independent, we can safely say that it’s a standout pick for your magazine or news site. Check out the demo, and see for yourself!
6. The Issue
If you want your magazine site to become a success, you have two primary tasks. You need to create interesting and high-quality content, and then show it off in the best possible light. While you’re on your own with the first task, The Issue can help with the latter.
This theme is all about helping you display your content in a way that’s organized, attractive, and unique. To do that, it starts by giving you a ton of demo content to work with, including page sections, header styles, article types, and more. Then, it enables you to customize all of those elements to your heart’s content.
Plus, you’ll find plenty of features that will help you make your content look amazing. That includes several custom widgets, lightbox gallery options, various typography choices, and more. There’s even built-in advertising functionality, giving you a quick-and-easy way to monetize your articles.
When you’re looking for a dedicated magazine theme, The Issue stands out above many of its competitors. We’d suggest checking out its demo, and seeing it in action for yourself!
7. The Fox
The Fox is a modern, flexible, and fully responsive WordPress theme that gives you the freedom to create a truly unique site.
The Fox comes with a variety of layouts to help you attain a distinctive design, including Real Newspaper, Grid Layout, Pinterest-like Masonry blog, and Listing Layout. You can also choose a layout for each category. In terms of blog post layouts, you can use the customizer to change the default layout (a two-column layout like a real newspaper) to one-column traditional blog post layouts. You can also play around with image layouts. For example, you can insert a vertical image in your posts for aesthetics, or to make optimal use of space. The Fox certainly delivers flexibility when it comes to layouts.
Other design features include various fonts (Google, Typekit, or even your own), a drag-and-drop gallery, a selection of widgets, and much more. You have close to 100 options when it comes to design customization.
Although the features list may sound overwhelming, The Fox is an intuitive and easy-to-use WordPress theme.
8. Anymag
Web content is available in abundance, so making your online magazine stand out is vital. Fortunately, Anymag includes the features you’ll need to build a unique brand identity for your publication.
For starters, you’ll have your choice of unlimited color options and over 900 Google Fonts. Considering how important typography is to traditional print magazines, finding the perfect typeface for your digital publication can really help bring it to life. Animal also provides several demos you can install, and it’s compatible with the Elementor page builder.
There are many ways to monetize your online magazine. If you want to sell merchandise or other products, Anymag is WooCommerce-ready and will enable you to set up an online store with ease. It’s also compatible with handy tools for connecting with your readers, such as Mailchimp and Contact Form 7.
If you’re worried about your online magazine blending in, Anymag can help it make a strong impression. It’s also a solid contender if you’re hoping to get your site up and running quickly.
9. Axwell
Whether you’re a food, fashion, or travel blogger, you don’t want to rely solely on social media to communicate with your readers. You want them to engage with you directly on your page — a potential job for Pixwell.
The theme is packed with features to help you share your content in a stunning, fully responsive layout. You can easily install demo content with just one click, and the drag-and-drop built-in Ruby Composer lets you create a modern design without any coding knowledge. The layout options are practically unlimited, too, with hundreds of available customization options. There is also the ability to create eye-catching galleries and choose from over 800 Google Fonts to meet your vision.
Pixwell has plenty of functionality related to blogging, too, such as bookmarks to save your content for later or the option to react to your posts with emojis. You can also monetize your magazine through affiliate networks such as Amazon Associates or place ads via Google AdSense anywhere on your site.
All in all, Pixwell is a robust, fast-loading theme for business-savvy bloggers and magazines. Its flexible design can adapt to any niche and help you share your content with a wider audience, so it’s worth a closer look.
10. MH Magazine
Magazine websites are often bustling with eye-catching content, but if your design isn’t engaging, you may find visitors go elsewhere for their news. For a theme offering a clean design and a flexible layout, look to MH Magazine.
This theme comes with 26 widget locations available and a fully widgetized front page template to make use of the various built-in custom widgets to display your content, social media, YouTube videos, and more. There are also sections to display prominent advertising to your website’s visitors.
Styling your page is possible with a selection of Google Fonts, a myriad of color options, and a custom logo uploader – so your site’s branding isn’t compromised by style restrictions.
MH Magazine also bundles the FlexSlider 2 plugin, allowing you to display important posts and articles prominently, and a jQuery news ticker – for shorter, yet important items of interest.
All in all, MH Magazine is a very worthy contender if you need an uncluttered yet flexible design for your magazine website.
