65+ Best WordPress News Themes – Want More Readers?

We collected some of the best WordPress news themes for you to help you get started building a news website! One of the most disruptive trends right now is the move from reading printed to checking short news updates online. It is common that users get their daily news doze using a mobile device so to keep up in the online news niche websites should be responsive.  

A great looking and mobile ready WordPress news website template can be an excellent solution for building a news website. The structure and layout of a news website template have great influence on the ability to attract more readers. Even if the content is value adding and fresh relevant news, it must be easy to digest and navigate.

As I have covered in several articles lately, WordPress is really rocking the web design and development boat right now. It is to some extent a disruptive technology not only dominating the blogging space, but also taking ground in nearly any other niche, changing how most web sites are built. WordPress is very popular for many non-blogging websites, and since news posting is highly similar to the blogging roots of WordPress it makes perfectly sense to use WordPress as foundation for a news website. Depending on your needs of course I would recommend you look for themes with flexible front page templates or even a page builder. In addition, I would like to have a meaty set of shortcodes and widgets to set up the news presentation effectively. Examples of this could be multiple options for setting up news listings and sliders.

WordPress is also picking up popularity for building websites that offer news updates and for a reason. Setting up a news site using WordPress is a fast and cheap process and using a great WordPress news theme is the first important step to make your site look just as cool and professional as the big sites. In this article, we are going to do a quick but extensive rundown of the best WordPress news style themes for building professional news websites. Just a word of note, these news website templates are not only good for online news and magazine sites, but for any other website with a lot to say. That is, any website with lots of content, which are rapidly updated and categorized. Let us look at the extensive WordPress news theme roundup I have prepared for you below.

Disclosure: Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links and I will earn a commission if you purchase through those links (at no extra cost to you). I recommend that you do your own independent research before purchasing any product or service. This article is not a guideline, a recommendation or endorsement of specific products.

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Article Index

• Responsive news themes for WordPress
• Other useful WordPress news themes
• What to look for in a WordPress news theme

Responsive news themes for WordPress

As I briefly mentioned in the intro it is a good idea to prepare your site for the mobile future. The themes in this section are all responsive and mobile ready.

GrandNews – Responsive News Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO

With this amazing news theme for WordPress, GrandNews, you get a responsive layout with a design that have been optimized for news portals. The theme comes with a  modular and flexible homepage and to increase visitor interaction there is a build-in rating system. With GrandNews you get a theme that has been design for heavy-content websites, however, it may also turn out to be an excellent pick for busy bloggers!

Avanti – Flexible News WordPress Theme - MORE INFO / DEMO

This news website template for WordPress is a great choice for anyone build a content-heavy news portal. The theme is called Avanti and it is a comes with a responsive  layout for spoiling mobile visitors. The Avanti news themes is designed for websites with tons of news content, nowever since it is loaded with features, really a multi purpose theme, it will also work well for other website types.

UrbanNews – WordPress News Website Template - MORE INFO / DEMO

UrbanNews is a nice 3 column news Website template for WordPress. It comes with a cool news widget at the top for featuring important and trending news. The news ticker and the news slider also gives this theme what you need to build a news portal that stand out.

The theme is not going to get you doen on features and flexibility. It allows you to define unlimited color schemes and as many galleries as you need. In addtions, it includes 11 page templates, 2 custom widgets included. The UrbanNews theme is built with a responsive grid layout and it is great for content-heavy news website that need to work on mobile devices.  The theme also have a collection of 125 customizable icons available. There is plenty of reserved space for adding ads and monetize the news website.

The Gossip: Funky News WordPress Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO

Let us have a look at The Gossip. It is a cool news theme for building WordPress news websites that stand out! The design of The Gossip is ultra-wide for desktops and it is mobile friendly and fully responsive. What I like about this theme is the extra space it provides for rolling out news on wider screens. In addition, the theme have a meaty collection of shortcodes and this makes it flexible and easy to set up the page layouts you need. There is also a review system included and it is useful for improving user interaction.

Deadline – Responsive WordPress News Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO

With dealine you get a classic and minimalistinc WordPress news theme with a responsive layout. The theme is packed with many custom options and widgets to list your news posts in a flexible way.

Volcano – Responsive WordPress News / Blog Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO

Check out the Volcano news theme for WordPress it is one of my favorites. Volcano is minimalistic, fully responsive and it comes with some pretty cool widgets for featuring news. To mention some details I can say that Volcano comes with 17 custom widgets, 18+ widgetized areas, 5 post formats. This is more than enough for build a great news website!

EffectiveNews – Responsive WP News Website Template – MORE INFO / DEMO

With the EffectiveNews template for News websites, we have another cool WordPress news theme with a mobile ready layout. The design is optimal for a serious news website with many news categories

Voyage – Travel News WordPress Theme - MORE INFO / DEMO

Voyage is a great WordPress news website template for building a travel news site but it will also work for many other news niches. The front page design includes a cool slider and options for creating news columns. The design of this news theme is minimalistic and clean, which leaves optimal space for the news stories.

Splash News Template – MORE INFO | DEMO

Splash is a clean and simple, yet powerful news template for WordPress with article rating system build in to encaurage visitors to participate and share their opinions. You will find Splash t obe useful for news and product reviews but it also inclides the needed features to work well as a blog. It is fully responsive and will adapt well to mobile devices.

Metro Magazine Responsive WordPress Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO

Metro Magazine is a clean and modern news theme for WordPress designed with a flat and metro like look and feel. It is responsive and will do a great job as a news website template even for mobile users. The layout is 3 column with two sidebars to the right and it is a cool way to have a lot of content presented on a news site front page. Metro Magazine also have a great solution for featuring news at the top of the site.

Galmour – Minimal WordPress News Template – MORE INFO | DEMO

Galmour is a minimalistic WordPress news website template with great design for a news site or very active blog. The included options for adding articles to category listings makes it ideal for featuing various news topics and keep readers up to date on everything.

Magzimize: Bold News & Magazine WordPress Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO

A bold news and magazine WordPress Theme, great user experience makes complexity being easy. Awesome usability and SEO optimized, suite for content lover and collecting great resource on the internet.

Supreme – Retina Responsive Magazine/Blog WP Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO

Supreme is a revolutionary Retina Responsive Magazine/Blog theme. Clean, modern, and crystal clear graphics. Featuring the incredible Swift Page Builder, you can now create and manage content the way you want, with ease.

WP-Clear – News Website Template – MORE INFO / DEMO

Solostream recently released version 2.0 of their popular simple WordPress theme, WP-Clear. This updated version includes numerous new features and layout options with magazine, business and blog layout styles. Other features include 2 content sliders, multiple post and page layout options, integrated banner ad spots, options panel for easy customization and more. This simple WordPress theme is a “must see”.

MINIMALIST – MORE INFO | DEMO

Minimalist is a clean, minimal theme for users who want their content to shine. With Minimalist, your content is highlighted through subtle accents in the design, without creating a distracting experience for the user. With a fluid grid, Minimalist is responsive and will adjust to any situation you use it for.

Lucid WordPress Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO

Lucid is a sleek and modern magazine theme that does a great job displaying tons of content while at the same time avoiding the feeling of clutter. Clean design elements and a strict grid give the theme an organized layout that is a pleasure to read. Lucid is also fully responsive, meaning that the design will adapt to mobile phones and tablets for a more intuitive browsing experience.

Megazine – Responsive WordPress Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO

Megazine is a WordPress theme especially for blog, magazine, news editorial. It’s very clean, minimal with modern design. This theme is also has a responsive ability. Moreover, it comes with tons of features.

Eris – Responsive WordPress Magazine Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO

Eris is a professional magazine WordPress theme with clean, flexible and fully responsive design. It is ideal for the magazine, news and personal blog sites. The Eris theme is highly configurable, you can completely configure the homepage and posts using the very easy and powerful theme options. The theme is built with HTML5 and CSS3 .

Explosion – Responsive WordPress News Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO

Explosion is a Responsive WordPress Theme, best suited for News Magazines and Blogs. It comes with 13 awesome widgets, 10 post formats, awesome Page Builder and tons of theme options. Explosion developed on the Bootstrap — beautifull boilerplate for responsive development so it look beautiful at any size, be it a 17” laptop screen or an iPad, iPhone.

Aggregate – WordPress News Website Template – MORE INFO / DEMO

Aggregates comes packed with tons of content and widget-ready areas, and manages to display everything in a clear and readable manner. We have also added some handy new widgets, as well as many new advertisement areas. If you have been searching for a feature-rich Magazine-style theme for your blog, then look no further! Further the ElegantThemes club is one of the most affortable and it is packed with good themes you can use on as many sites as you like.

LitePress – MORE INFO | DEMO

A very simple, yet powerful theme with a responsive layout so you can be sure that everyone from any device will get the most from your website.

Gonzo – Clean, Responsive WP Magazine – MORE INFO / DEMO

Gonzo is built with semantic HTML5/CSS3 and is completely responsive. Not only is it responsive but it also keeps that magazine feel right down to mobile screen sizes. Practically every typographic element has been endlessly tweaked for different screen sizes to make sure it looks great no matter what the device.

Atlantic News – Responsive WordPress Magazine Blog - MORE INFO / DEMO

Atlantic News is a Responsive, Highly Customizable & Fully Widgetized Premium WordPress Theme and comes with a bundle of features. The flexible and widgetized layout lets you easily adapt the theme to your needs. You can display articles in many ways, with the feature slider or as featured categories.

BoxLine – News Template – MORE INFO |DEMO

Boxline is a clean, modern and elegant WordPress magazine theme. With a combination of subtle, soft grays, clean textures and some bright colors, your site will stand out. Plus, it includes everything you’ve come to expect from MyThemeShop, including premium support.

SimplePress – Simple WordPress Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO

SimplePress is a simple and clean page-based corporate WordPress theme. It is great for anyone looking to give their website professional look and feel. The theme features a business style homepage with a beautiful well integrated JavaScript slider and clear hierarchy, as well as fully functional Blog and Gallery sections.

MagMan – Responsive News/Blog WP theme – MORE INFO / DEMO

MagMan is a WordPress theme for blog, magazine & news editorial. It’s very clean, minimal with modern responsive design.

Magnovus – Responsive News WordPress Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO

Magnovus is premium quality WordPress theme for magazines and news sites with rating features. It’s fully responsive theme (it works great on iPad) with extensive Theme Options panel. You can easily change colors scheme and backgrounds.

Vienna – Responsive WordPress Magazine Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO

Vienna is a Responsive WordPress Magazine Theme designed specifically for the Magazines, News sites and Blogs. It features a very clean and minimal design and is packed with full of features and tons of unique widgets.

Inspiration Responsive WordPress Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO

Inspiration is a Responsive WordPress Magazine Theme designed specifically for the Magazines, News sites and Blogs. It features a very clean and minimal design.

WP-Prosper – MORE INFO / DEMO

WP-Prosper is a clean, professional WordPress theme suitable for a business website, blog or online magazine.

CNEWS – Responsive Magazine and Blog Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO

CNEWS is a feature-rich WordPress magazine theme. Great for magazine , review, news and blog sites, with integrated reviews, video, slideshows, galleries and ADS system in each post.

NewsTrick – Responsive WordPress Magazine / Blog – MORE INFO / DEMO

NewsTrick is a super-duper customizable, flexible, responsive WordPress theme for your Blog, Magazine or News website.
NewsTrick can be configured to focus on your work, your blogging, or both. Theme is powered by the SMOF Options Panel, which provides tons of options to manage and modify any aspect of the theme – it is well suited for both beginners with no coding knowledge and developers.

deTube – Professional Video WordPress Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO

deTube is a cool video news WordPress theme designed for professional video News/magazine websites, video blog or vVideo portal. This theme will help you get a professional video site up and running quickly, it is inspired by the popular websites: YouTube, Vimeo and Dribbble. No modest to say that it is the most powerful video WordPress theme so far.

VOLT – Editorial WordPress News Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO

Volt theme for WordPress is designed for magazine, news and editorial ventures. With content and readability being the primary goal, the theme is designed with flexible layout pattern and decent space for advertisements. The theme introduces a layout swapping option that will let you move the content in desirable location, and is helpful when you are experimenting with visual hierarchy and user eye pattern. Backed with custom widgets, visual short codes, exclusive widget areas and custom page templates, the theme is envisioned to provide you more flexibility and ease-of-customization for your next editorial project.

Sahifa – Responsive WordPress News – MORE INFO / DEMO

Sahifa is a clean Responsive Magazine, News and Blog Template with a really cool set of options pages.

Loook – Responsive Magazine – MORE INFO / DEMO

The Loook theme is a fresh take on a WordPress magazine. With the innovative ‘tile system’ it mainly focuses on photo-centric content, and therefore serves the current trend defined by Pinterest and Polyvore. The theme offers abeautifuly polished and clean appearence with responsive layout.

Serpent – Responsive Social Network Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO

Serpent is a responsive social network WordPress theme build to power sites with multiple users and provide community content sharing. Used as a news theme it helps promoting the content and building a tribe around a specific topic.

Modernizm – MORE INFO / DEMO

Modernizm is a modern-looking premium WordPress theme suited for online magazine, news portal or even personal web site. Its simple and clean layout make reading content easy and comfortable. Modernizm is designed to have responsive layout. That means your website will look great no matter the device or screen size on which it’s being viewed. Modernizm also has a special author page template, which lists all your site authors. Modernizm comes with two widget positions: sidebar and footer.

Construct, a Responsive WordPress News Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO

Construct is a smart, professional and responsive theme designed to show off your (or someone else’s) work. It can be used as a personal portfolio or as great place to link to anything you think deserves it. It utilises a column based layout and some funky animation effects to keep your users entertained. Construct also takes advantage of AJAX which allows the user to load more corresponding posts on the fly without reloading the page or hindering SEO . It also degrades gracefully if JavaScript is disabled. You also get a bunch of options to customise your theme as well as a variety of shortcodes and post editor extras to enhance your content.

TypeMagz – MORE INFO / DEMO

TypeMagz gives your blog a nice magazine look with a good color contrast that makes your posts stand out and easier to read. It comes with theme administration panel and is tailored for journalists and online magazines.

Splendid – MORE INFO / DEMO

Splendid is an elegant magazine-style WordPress theme packed with additional color styles and lots of great built-in features, such as video support, custom page templates and custom widgets.

Arras Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO

Great looking free WordPRess News Themes with 7 color styles.

Other useful WordPress news themes

Forester – Classic News Website Template for WordPress - MORE INFO / DEMO

Forrester has a non-classic magazine layout with good navigation options and lots of space for content on the front page.

Zenko Magazine – WordPress Theme for News Websites - MORE INFO / DEMO

Zenko Magazine is a stylish & colorful theme intended for those who want to launch a magazine or blog! The flexible layout allows you to easily adapt your content to the theme.

Tribune – Classic News Template for WordPress - MORE INFO / DEMO

This is another great WPZoom creation and among my favorite picks when it comes to choosing WordPress news themes!

Daily Theme - MORE INFO / DEMO

This theme offers a clean and simple design but still allows for a lot of content to be presented in a magazine style.

WP-Aire - MORE INFO / DEMO

Bright, light and flexible is what you get with WP-Aire. Whether you want a business website, a simple blog layout or a full-fledged magazine-style site, WP-Aire will have you and your WordPress site flyin high in no time at all.

Evertis - MORE INFO / DEMO

The perfect theme for your magazine or blog with tons of features like featured articles, social bookmarks and a very flexible layout which is easy to customize.

Dardania News Theme – MORE INFO / DEMO

Dardania is a premium WordPress theme for review, blog, magazine and news websites with fresh and clean design.

CadabraPress - MORE INFO / DEMO

CadabraPress is a minimalistic and clean WordPress theme design for news websites and online magazines. It provides the visitoes with a professional and elegant display of news posts with various options for placement and style.

WordPress Newspaper - MORE INFO / DEMO

Today’s News WordPress News Template - MORE INFO / DEMO

Todays News is a free premium WordPress theme with featured content option and options page. Supports post thumbnails. Suitable for any niche, especially for news or magazine sites.

NewsReport - MORE INFO / DEMO

NewsReport is a 3 column news website template for WordPress. It is a free news theme with featured content option and an options page for setting up the site to meet your needs. The theme is well widgetized and it provides supports post thumbnails.

What to look for in a WordPress news theme

• Get a fresh baked and still hot theme. You should be looking for availability of recent updates, good support, other user’s ratings and comments of the theme you like before choosing. While we try our best to keep this article up to date there is always a risk that themes are suddenly not supported any more.
• Be clear on you news website requirements: Consider if it is a good idea to make a list of news related features your website will need – In addition it is a good idea to make a simple sketch of how the layout should be. This will make your life much easier once you start comparing the many available news themes.
• Commonly required features in a good WordPress news theme: When looking for a theme to set up a news website using WordPress you need a pagebuilder, shortcodes or widgets to display news in as many ways a possible. The more flexible display you have the more variation you can create. This is good for making your site dynamic and still make news available in a cool way. An example of this could be a post widget with grid layout, a widget with news presented as a content slider form a specific category or tag.
• Another cool feature for news websites is a news ticker to be placed e.g. in the header to show one liners of breaking news. You can find this kind of functionality in plugins, however, it is much more convenient to have it included in the theme you find. Otherwise, you may need to hire a designer to make it fit into the design.
• Social sharing is critical for news websites and it is great of the capability is available in the theme you choose. There are many cool plugins for adding social sharing buttons as well, but again if you want the buttons integrated into the content e.g. in the front page it is a bit harder with plugins.
• You also need to look for responsive features and test how well the mobile layouts are implemented. Use responsive design tools to test the various screen sizes. You want the news to be easy to digest even on the smallest screens.
• Navigation is also critical to get right. You may want to look for themes with multiple menus, as it is great for news websites to have one navigation bar for news categories and another one for about, contact, etc. Some themes have mega menus and they can be quite cool for news websites. Keep in mind though that the navigation must adapt well to mobile screens on mobile devices if you go for a mobile ready theme.

If we missed a few great WordPress news themes you think should be added to this post, or if you have any comments or suggestions, as to how to improve this list, please feel free to write them below. We will have that covered in a future post or an update.