When you are designing a news website, the design is everything. Readers want to go straight to the information they are looking for. They don’t like unclear navigation or visually attractive interface to get in their way. Choosing the right Responsive WordPress theme for your news website is indeed a critical job, as there are many poorly designed news themes available.
The specific features you want for picking a news theme will vary with your site’s exact purpose, although you will want a theme that prioritizes readability and ease of navigation. You will also want that the theme should be SEO optimized since readers only want up-to-date news content. Additionally, if you want to monetize your site then support for ads is a must.
To help you choose the right theme, we have compiled here a list of WordPress news themes. Let’s get started!
List of 5 Best News WordPress Themes
1. MH Magazine
Since your website displays a large amount of content, the layout should be clean and inviting. Otherwise, your visitors may go elsewhere for their daily news reading. If you are looking for a theme that has an uncluttered design with a flexible layout, consider MH Magazine.
The theme has more than 26 widget locations including a fully widgetized front page template to create flexible layouts, and sections to display advertising. A large number of custom widgets are also available to display content like posts based on categories or tags, social media, YouTube videos, and more.
Important news stories can be displayed prominently using the bundled FlexSlider 2 plugin, and a jQuery news ticker is also available for short rolling news items. A custom logo uploader, an extensive color palette, and a wide selection of Google Fonts are also available to help you match your website’s style to your branding. If you wish to make more customizations to MH Magazine, the developers have included files to create a child theme. Overall, MH Magazine is ideal for those needing a clean design along with a flexible layout to deliver daily news content.
2. Newspaper - Best News WordPress Theme
Often the best themes are designed for a specific purpose, which suits the needs of a certain type of user into account. Newspaper is such a theme – it’s built specifically for news and magazine websites.
This theme has over 85,000 happy customers and still counting. It is accessible to inexperienced users while still providing plenty of professional-level options. It is also mobile-optimized which makes it fast, uncluttered, and prioritizes performance and functionality. Moreover, it can take the strain of lots of content and high-resolution images while keeping the load times fast. The intuitive and easy-to-use interface makes the design process quicker, especially with over 50 pre-built demos to choose from. If you’d like to create your own layouts, you can do so with either of two bundled page builder plugins – tagDiv Composer or Visual Composer – and the front-end CSS editor.
3. TheGem
When it comes to building a news website, the layout is important. With so much content to present, you need a clear layout to navigate through it, without confusing your readers. Fortunately, TheGem will help you out.
TheGem has a luxurious and modern feel, combined with a lot of additional features. With plenty of navigation options, as well as header and footer customization, you can create a layout that matches your unique requirements. Like this, you’ll be able to feature your news content for maximum engagement.
Furthermore, TheGem is easy to use and comes with the WPBakery Page Builder plugin for a seamless design. It has over 400 demo layouts, flexible page creation options, a powerful admin interface, and much more.
4. The Issue
It’s likely you will be publishing a lot of daily content on your news website. Therefore, you’ll need a theme that’s both flexible and simple to use. Fortunately, The Issue has both these features.
The Issue comes packed with a wide range of demos and templates, which helps you design your website with ease. Much of this demo content is suited to publishing and displaying news articles. Moreover, there are various post formats, gallery displays, and review style options to pick from, giving you a lot of options over how your content appears.
Social media integration is also very important for a news-focused site, and The Issue helps you with this too. You can display share counts on articles, include links to your social media profiles, and provide ways for readers to share your content.
5. PenNews
When building a news website, it’s essential to create a home page that showcases a variety of visually appealing content. The majority of news themes, however, are not minimalistic. With PenNews, you can avoid this drawback.
Out of the box, the WPBakery Page Builder plugin lets you arrange your site elements with ease with a drag-and-drop interface. Also comes with PenNews is the Convert Plug plugin, which is extremely useful for growing and managing your email subscriber list.
What makes PenNews stand out is the huge scope at your disposal for layout customization. You can choose from a wide range of options of 40 content block styles, over ten grid layouts, as well as a broad array of custom video playlists and gallery styles.