Top WordPress Themes for News Websites

Updated on 3 December 2024 14 min Read
Top WordPress Themes for News Websites

You can clearly see the influence of the Internet on our day-to-day lives, it’s increasingly apparent. As digital technology has risen, people are now relying on the internet for accessing up-to-the-minute news, updates, and recent developments. Therefore, launching a news portal is the ideal solution for sharing news with the largest number of audience. For that, WordPress is the most hassle-free and quickest way to create a news website. 

You could be questioning why go with WordPress. Because it offers an outstanding platform for building a website without requiring any coding knowledge ensuring reliability. Above all, what matters is its dependability and trustworthiness. 

Additionally, world-renowned top news brands like CNN, Vogue, and The New York Times count on WordPress. If you too are dreaming of starting a successful news portal, the key is to begin by selecting a perfect WordPress newspaper theme and WordPress hosting that will lay a perfect foundation for your success.

The cherry on top – these amazing WordPress themes for news sites are absolutely free! In this blog, we’ll be explaining WordPress themes plus sharing some of the best themes for news website in WordPress, all free to download and perfect for improving your news portal’s style and functionality.

Table Of Content

Must-Have Features for WordPress Theme for News Website

For a striking and functional news website, it is necessary to select best WordPress theme for news website that perfectly blends looks, usability, and excellent performance. Therefore, always weigh the key aspects of different WP news themes before selecting the best free WordPress themes

Consider each feature starting from mobile-friendly layouts to SEO friendliness offering flawless experience for visitors. Consider the following essential factors to make a wise decision: 

– Multi-Device Compatibility

Irrespective of the device, your WordPress theme for news website should be a visual delight on all screen sizes, whether on a desktop or smartphone device. Multi-device compatibility makes sure that your website is seamlessly accessible to all users.

– Personalization Options

Find a WP news theme that provides a broad range of personalization options. You must have the option to easily customize colors, fonts, and layouts to effortlessly present your brand’s true essence.

– SEO-Friendly

Selecting an SEO-friendly WordPress theme for news websites assures that your website earns a higher search engine ranking, driving more visitors to your website.

– Performance and Speed Optimization

Blazing fast WordPress news themes help maintain user engagement as well as keep your website working efficiently. Slow-loading websites are something from the past!

– Support and Regular Updates

Select the best WordPress news themes for your website that are backed by continuous updates and excellent customer service so as to safeguard your website and keep it ahead of the competition.

– User-Friendly 

A WordPress newspaper theme with an intuitive user interface simplifies the process of configuration and website management, even if you’re not a tech expert.

Prioritizing these crucial elements will help you find the best WordPress news themes for your website that fulfill your distinct requirements and maximize the performance of your website. By installing a perfect WordPress theme for news websites, you can offer a captivating experience to your readers, thus, laying the strong foundation for your website’s success.

Top WordPress Newspaper Themes

Find the best WordPress news themes free that offer sleek, responsive, and performance-driven experiences that keep readers engaged. The following WordPress news themes provide effortless personalization, faster page load speeds, and search engine optimization to highlight your website and grow your reader base.

1. Newsmatic

Newsmatic

The Newsmatic is a lightning-fast, mobile-friendly, and intuitive free WordPress newspaper theme specifically crafted for news as well as blog websites and has over 20,000 active installations with great reviews.

This WP news theme offers a variety of styling and color options with pre-designed demos to simplify the process of designing a professional website. Furthermore, it offers excellent customer support to supercharge your website by harnessing this theme’s capabilities. 

2. PubNews

PubNews

Pubnews isn’t just a WP news theme but a complete package developed specifically for meeting all your distinct needs. It is completely customizable and compliant with the Elementor Addons plugin. 

It comes with over 4+ free starter demos, together with Elementor starter websites. To achieve the best results, use this theme by pairing it with the News Kit Elementor Addons plugin to unleash the true potential of your design. 

3. News Elementor

News Elementor

It’s a dynamic WordPress news theme packed with powerful, and fully compatible features custom-designed for news portal websites, online magazines, and blogs with the help of Elementor Builder.

Get the full benefit of News Kit Elementor Addons and supercharge Elementor Builder with 50+ exclusive widgets and layouts. Moreover, this WP news theme offers over 17+ pre-made professionally crafted templates for news, online magazines, and blogs.  

4. Digital Newspaper

Digital Newspaper

Digital Newspaper WordPress news theme has enthralled owners of  5000+ news websites on WordPress using its groundbreaking features. The main banner comes with a 3-column professional design that’s best suited for news websites. It comes with 7 front sections with 7 separate news block layouts and 9 custom Digital Newspaper widgets. You’ve got the option to select individual colors and designs for all the key components of the page at both its initial and hover states.

There are typography controls, 5 font families as well as font weights, for the website title, Navigation Menu, Block Title, Post Title, Post Meta, Post Content, Archive, and Single Post. The theme provides custom breadcrumb trail options for popular plugins such as Breadcrumb NavXT, Yoast SEO, and Rank Math SEO.

You’ll be presented with a choice between 5 welcome sidebar layouts for your front page, 5 for your archive page, 5 for your post, 5 for your page, and also 5-page layouts with a sticky option for every layout. There are also 2 basic archive layouts.

And the header section can also be sticky while scrolling up, and this theme is equipped with a scroll-to-top button. You also get the preference of selecting between two laid options: boxed and full-width layouts in all sections. Available with 5+ pre-built starter websites, that you’ll get to install in one click.

5. Trendy News

Trendy News

Trendy News is a free WordPress news theme that has active installations of over 1000. This theme is rich in features and fits perfectly with professional news websites. It has beautiful designs and flexible elements, customizable colors, and animations. It is both an SEO as well as WordPress website speed optimization plugin to help reach more readers and retain them to your news portal. You’ll have a positive experience with this theme.

6. Newspaperex

Newspaperex

Newspaperex WordPress newspaper theme is a modern and stylish child theme of Newsup Theme and has been trusted by over 6000 WordPress users. It is fully packed with widgets, which makes it easy to add widgets anywhere. Moreover, it’s SEO optimized, and compatible with RTL, offering multiple customization options. 

7. ChromeNews

ChromeNews

ChromeNews is one of the best WordPress news themes free and has been trusted by 7000 plus active users. It comes with several capabilities in order to build a professional news website and blog.

This WordPress newspaper theme supports translation and Gutenberg blocks, which develop visually appealing content. This best theme for news websites in WordPress is fully responsive and can auto-adapt to all screen sizes. Finally, in case of issues, their expert support team is just a call away.

8. ColorMag 

ColorMag

ColorMag is a free WordPress news theme that helps in developing a professional news website and online magazine. You can develop a classy and contemporary website with the help of this WP news theme. Currently, more than 60,000 websites are running in this theme.

Some dependable features include search engine optimized, responsive design, and social icons so you can refer them to your different social networking profiles featuring ColorMag. Likewise, cross-browser compatibility works across several browsers like Google and Mozilla Firefox. Furthermore, you get free support for any issue related to the WP news theme through the WordPress forum.

9. Newsup

Newsup

Newsup is a well-designed WordPress theme for news websites, with more than 20,000 active installations. It is widgetized, easy to use, and suitable for online newspapers, publishers, news, and magazines. The multi-color feature allows you to change the background and text of the block you are working on. Newsup is also SEO-friendly, WPML, Gutenberg, Translation, and RTL-ready.

10. News Portal

News Portal

News Portal is a free WordPress news theme, with more than 7000 active installations, and these top WordPress themes for blogging also work well for online publications and newspapers. This WordPress newspaper theme provides excellent features for your needs, the widgets that enable you to add a special feature to your website, responsive design, and crystal clear ability to use higher-resolution graphics and pictures with more pixels per square inch. Similarly, it delivers significant support to your requirements.

11. Poseidon

Poseidon

Poseidon is a beautiful free best WordPress theme for news websites; you can design an elegant news website by using this theme. It is actively used by 10,000+ active users. The white layout of the content gives it a spacious look, and the typography is also clean. It is also GDPR compliant, therefore protecting the consumers’ data and maintaining their privacy. It has responsive designs and is both search engine-optimized and speed-optimized.

12. HitMag

HitMag

HitMag is a classy, elegant, and powerful WordPress newspaper theme designed specifically for magazines, newspapers, and blogs. This WordPress news theme is also pretty much reviewed and rated with more than 10,000 active installations.

It contains six widget areas: Magazine Homepage, Main Sidebar, Header Advertisement Area, Footer Left Sidebar, Footer Mid Sidebar, and Footer Right Sidebar plus four different stylish post layouts.

13. Cream Magazine

Cream Magazine

Cream Magazine is one of the premium-quality free WordPress news and magazine website themes that brings very clean and modern designs perfect for a news website. Over 7,000 users have installed it.

It’s a pretty simple theme to configure your website with and is therefore quite simple. It comes with an authors widget so you can display the authors of your blog in your sidebar. In addition, it enables you to lazy load images and it’s responsive, and WooCommerce compatible- so selling any kind of product and service on your website will be easy and inexpensive for you.

14. CoverNews

CoverNews

CoverNews is a free clean, crisp, and totally free WordPress news theme and has over 8,000 active installations. The theme is fully responsive, thus perfectly adjusting to all screen sizes. It also possesses useful features like a 1-click demo import, easy setting up, Gutenberg compatibility for an even more visual environment, and it is completely responsive; the support is outstanding if you ever need to ask about something.

15. Minimalist Newspaper 

Minimalist Newspaper

Minimalist Newspaper is an entirely free WordPress child theme of Newspaperly WordPress news theme by SuperbThemes. Being mainly designed for publishing websites, news websites, and magazines, it exceeds 2,000 active installations.

One of the core features that have been integrated into this theme includes social icons, mobile friendliness, and related posts that pull the relevant metadata from your blog to show at the bottom of your posts. You can also integrate Ad programs like Adsense into your news website.

16. SuperMag

SuperMag

SuperMag is an excellent WordPress theme mainly for news websites, magazines, and blogs. It has more than 3000 active installations and great reviews.

With this theme, you can edit the header, footer, and sidebar in one easy click. Similarly, it features great capabilities like enabling or disabling the display Ads in the header, different options for Ad positions, and breadcrumb options in case that will give you the possibility to go back to some previous page or find new content, which is useful for you; at the end, it reminds you of the hierarchy on your website’s pages, and finally, you will be supported by the forum.

17. Newsphere

Newsphere

Newsphere is one of the best WordPress news themes, particularly designed for news, newspapers, magazines, and publishing websites. This theme has over 2000 active installations.

The features of Newsphere are ready-made designs that you can use for creating a website. It is translation-ready and fully responsive. It is coded and specially designed to make your website’s search engines optimized. At last, it is ready to help you to solve your problems.

18. General News

General News

The General News is a free child theme of the MoreNews WordPress theme for news websites, specifically meant for news, blogs, and magazine websites. It has over 2000 active installations. You can set up it with single-click facilities. It offers light and dark website modes, multiple customization tools, along with RTL support. Likewise, it assists you in ranking better on search engines.

19. Newsis

Newsis

This WordPress news theme provides a sophisticated 3-column design in the main banner. In addition, it boasts 7 front sections with 7 different news block layouts and 9 custom Newsis widgets.

Newsis Theme includes a primary slider and 2 trailing posts columns in the main banner section, that can be stacked or located on the sides. It comes up with 5+ free pre-built starter websites that you can install in 1-click with Blaze Demo Importer.

This WP news theme allows you to display custom Ads banners on particular devices like desktops, tablets, or mobiles. In the header, it has enabled the Off-Canvas menu by which you can add multiple widgets. Also, it has provided a Newsletter/subscribe option, live search, and custom button for better engagement and user retention.

11 free custom news widgets can be added on the right sidebar, left sidebar, and off-canvas menu. There is an option for a related news facility which can be enabled in the single post view and shown in the popup box or at the end of the post view. Breadcrumb trail options are available for premium WordPress plugin themes like Breadcrumb NavXT, Yoast SEO, and Rank Math SEO plugin in this theme.

20. FreeNews

FreeNews

FreeNews is a fully free WordPress news theme. Using this, you can make all types of news websites. It has 1000+ active installations. It contains all the elements of responsive design, seven social media icons, and SEO-friendly coding. It supports RTL also, so you can change your whole website to show all the content from right to left.

21. Viral News

Viral News

It is such a minimalist WordPress newspaper theme that anyone can understand it easily. It also contains a panel of customizers along with a live preview, translation ready, and search engine optimization. Pre-build demos are also present in it. You may add any widget in the given space. It is also compatible with most of the best WordPress plugins just like its competitors.

Essential Plugins for News Websites in WordPress

Check out the essential plugins for a successful WordPress news website:

  • WPForms: For creating flexible forms
  • Custom Twitter Feeds: To display tweets
  • WP Magazine Modules: To develop news block layouts
  • Mailpoet: To handle the newsletter and subscriptions
  • Paid Memberships Pro: To restrict access to different pieces of content
  • YouTube Embed: Embedded video content
  • Jetpack: Security, performance, social sharing
Final Takeaways

That’s all for our article. Here, we’ve listed out and described points you should look for in the WordPress news themes. Similarly, we explained the major features of wordpress news themes free. The Newsmatic WordPress theme is the best of all, and its dedicated developers always work hard to give you and your website the best experience.

We hope that this blog post will provide valuable insights to you, so that, you can now set up your own news website. MilesWeb’s WordPress hosting services will provide you with unmatched performance, reliability, speed, and dedicated support to meet your needs.

FAQs

How are WordPress news themes different from standard WordPress themes?

WordPress news themes have specifically been made for news and magazine-style websites, and they provide you with specialist features such as dynamic layouts, grid-based content, and easy category organization – something standard themes lack. They really focus on readability, quick-loading pages, and multimedia integration for easy presentation of frequent updates and multiple categories.

Which criterias are important to consider when selecting the right WP news theme for my website?

For a striking and functional news website, it is necessary to consider crucial elements when selecting the right WP news theme for your websites like multi-device compatibility, personalization options, SEO-friendliness, unmatched performance, speed optimization, client support, regular updates, and user-friendliness.

Do WordPress newspaper themes support multiple content types like standard, image, and video?

Yes, WordPress news themes allow the inclusion of multiple content types such as text, images, and videos. This diversity will enable you to include multimedia-rich news articles, which can stimulate the interest of users and make it even more engaging to read.

Is it possible to customize WordPress themes for news sites to match my brand?

With the help of WordPress Customizer, you can seamlessly change colors, fonts, and layouts in your WP news theme to improve your brand image. It also offers drag-and-drop functionality, which enables users to customize their header and footer sections, and allows users to toggle the Dark mode on or off.

The Author

I'm a seasoned Technical Writer with over a decade of experience in the field. I've a strong background in translating complex technical information into clear and concise documentation for a variety of audiences. Also, known for meticulous attention to detail and her ability to work efficiently under tight deadlines.