Designing a digital magazine is a balancing act. You need a theme that enables you to showcase a lot of content on a single screen while at the same time ensuring that it’s all responsive, readable, fast-loading, and attractive.
To help you narrow down your search, we’ve got 20 of the best WordPress magazine themes below. You’ll find both free and premium themes and templates, all built specifically to help you design a high-quality digital publication.
The best WordPress magazine themes for 2025
When selecting a theme for your online magazine, here are some things to look for:
- Readability: Every page — even the busy home page — should be easy to read on all devices, including assistive technologies.
- Visuals: There should be a balanced mix of written and visual content on each page.
- Organization: The layout should be well organized and structured.
- Customizability: There should be various layout options available for each page type.
- Features: You’ll need magazine-specific features, like author bios, ad space, social sharing, smart search, and more.
- Speed: The theme has to be optimized for speed and include tools for image optimization, lazy loading, and more.
- Search engine optimization: SEO is critical, so it’s ideal if the theme has its own SEO tool or integrates with Yoast.
Eager to start building your publication? Start with one of these top magazine themes:
The Achilles multipurpose magazine and blog template for WordPress is beautifully designed. With ample white space and a stylish look, this would be a great starting point for fashion and beauty magazines.
The template comes with important magazine-building features, like mega menu configuration, parallax featured images, and Google AdSense integration. You also have lots of page layouts you can mix and match for the home page, blog posts, category pages, and more. What’s more, there are various layout options for blog post elements like the author, comment, and related posts blocks.
Although Authentic is referred to as a lifestyle blog and magazine theme, its 50 demos suggest otherwise. You can see how easy it is to repurpose this WordPress theme for all kinds of digital publications — for education, fitness, travel, music, and many other niches.
Another reason to get excited about this theme is that it comes with built-in performance optimization like optimized CSS, adaptive imagery, Ajax pagination, and conditional loading. It also has some neat publication features like highlight & share, estimated reading time, and auto-loading the next post.
Buzz is a personal and lifestyle WordPress blog theme. That said, the built-in demos don’t look or feel like small-time blogs. They look like professionally polished magazines. So, regardless of how big your publication is, this theme will give your brand a larger-than-life appearance.
In addition, there’s so much you can do to customize these already-beautiful demos. With 40 page and post templates and a variety of layouts for the header, mega menu, pagination, social media, and more, it’s easy to make this publication uniquely your own.
CheerUp is a highly customizable magazine WordPress theme with over 1,000 possible layout combinations. You can tell that each of the demos was built with care, taking into consideration the unique needs for different kinds of online magazines.
Beyond that, CheerUp is a really well-updated and supported theme. The developer does a great job in updating the demos, features, and options available within the theme. At the same time, they also focus on the overall performance of the theme, with speed and search engine optimizations regularly maintained.
ColorMag is a free WordPress theme for magazines and newspapers. It comes with over 30 starter sites for all kinds of publication themes, so you’ll easily find something to fit your needs.
If you’re worried about the amount of work involved in setting up an online magazine, ColorMag is a good choice. Not only are the demos and settings easy to configure, the theme is compatible with all major page builder plugins, including Elementor, Beaver Builder, SiteOrigin, and Brizy. So you can build and customize your site using the tool of your choice.
Davenport is a WordPress magazine template that you can use for a wide variety of niches, like food, tech, travel, lifestyle, and more. It comes with 9 demos, 29 mix-and-match homepage blocks, 12 blog layouts, and other building blocks.
The nice thing about this theme is that the developer hasn’t just paid attention to creating beautiful and functional designs. It comes with unique magazine features like a reading progress bar, image captions, ad banner management, sponsored content badges, among others. Plus, it supports AMP and structured data, which are a must for optimizing magazines for search.
Foxiz is a news and magazine theme for WordPress that’s fully responsive. Not only that, it’ll enable you to design pages that don’t feel overly cumbersome on tablets and smartphones. For instance, horizontal scroll mode allows you to display a carousel of stories horizontally, saving mobile users from having to spend so much time scrolling.
Another great thing about this theme is its unique feature set. For starters, it allows for frontend post submission, which will come in handy if you want to add an editorial section to your publication. Also, it comes with features like personalized content recommendations, social counters, and affiliate product blocks.
GutenVerse is a sleek and attractive WordPress magazine template. Compared to some of the other themes and templates on this list, this one is much simpler as you won’t have as many demos and layouts to choose from. But that’s okay as it comes with the Redux Framework, which makes customizing your magazine site a cinch.
This theme is also compatible with Elementor, which will also make for speedy customization and editing. What’s nice about GutenVerse is that it adds essential news and magazine widgets to Elementor. So there’s no need to upgrade to Pro. The theme gives you everything you need already!
HitMag is a freemium WordPress theme for magazines, newspapers, and blogs. If you’re looking for something simpler and more budget-friendly to start your new publication with, check out HitMag. The free version of the theme will fulfill your basic publishing needs.
There’s a Pro version you can scale up to if you need it. The premium theme is compatible with Elementor and SiteOrigin if you’d prefer to design using those plugins. It also includes useful features like sticky navigation, threaded comments, post view counts, and video post formats. Plus, you can do a lot more with your footer, which will come in handy with larger magazines.
Katerio is a stylish magazine WordPress template with plentiful demos to help you get started. In addition to the niche publication demos you’ll find with most magazine themes, this one also includes an RTL (right-to-left) one. So, if you’re publishing in languages like Hebrew or Arabic, this template will be a huge time saver.
Something else worth mentioning about Katerio is that it’s designed for high engagement. Not only does it look great and load quickly, it comes with features like content-rich sidebars and auto-loading of posts.
Newsblock is a super reliable theme for magazine websites. Although the selection of demos isn’t super extensive, the Canvas block builder combined with the theme options give you unlimited capabilities for customizing your publication. You can use a combination of post blocks, importable sections, as well as blocks and widgets of your own making.
There are some really awesome features in this theme that will help you take your designs and content to the next level. For starters, imagery is adaptive, so it’ll automatically fit whatever screens your readers are using. Also, it includes a live search tool, so users don’t have to wait for the search results screen to find matching articles. What’s more, it’s easy to integrate your email marketing service so you can start signing up subscribers.
Newspaper is a versatile newspaper and magazine WordPress theme. Whatever type of digital publication you want to build, they’ve likely thought of it already. With more than 150 pre-built websites to start from, you’ll have a strong head start when launching your next publication.
There are some other cool things happening with this theme. For starters, it’s built for lightning fast speeds with adaptive JS, lazy loading, a lightened DOM, and CSS analyzer. What’s more, it comes with a paywall and subscription plugin so you can easily monetize your premium content.
Newsreader is one of the newer WordPress themes on this list, but it’s already proven itself to be a ThemeForest user favorite. To start, each of the demos has a clean, classic, and content-first design. As such, Newsreader would be perfect for magazines with high-octane or complex imagery that would benefit from more simplistic designs, like auto, sports, and tech gear.
The developer seems to have a good understanding of how much page speed performance affects digital publications. In addition to designing a well-optimized theme, Newsreader also comes with just one plugin: Elementor. So it’s not going to be weighed down by a dozen or so plugins as can happen with other themes.
Minimalism seems like a contradiction of terms when it comes to magazines. However, Opinion does a good job of pulling it off. This beautiful, stylish WordPress theme would work really well for websites that do a lot of their storytelling through imagery. Think beauty and fashion magazines. It would work really well for personal blogs, too.
On top of looking great, Opinion is built for ease of use. While settings and features are a bit more simplified than some of these larger multipurpose magazine themes, it’s very easy to dig into the theme and customize it — without having to do any coding either.
Pixwell is a very well-built and regularly updated magazine WordPress theme. It’s also SEO-friendly, with tools for creating schema markup, open graph data, Google sitelinks search box results, and structured header tags. The theme is fast, too, which is crucial for SEO.
If you’re looking for a theme that will encourage your readers to engage more with your content, this is a good one to look at. For instance, you can add features to your site that enable readers to bookmark favorite posts, write reviews, and add emoji reactions.
SmartMag is a beautifully built WordPress theme for magazines and newspapers. There are over 50 unique demo designs to start from, many of which cater to niches you won’t find in many other magazine themes. For instance, there are demos for politics, crypto, activism, local news, and health.
This feature-rich theme is constantly being improved by the developer. So keeping your magazine site up to date with the latest features and tools will be easy. For example, you can monetize your site with sponsored posts, add a scrolling mobile navigation, and add views counters and ratings to your content.
Soledad is a multipurpose magazine, blog, and newspaper theme for WordPress. There’s a vast collection of demos available (we’re talking hundreds of them), so you’re sure to find a high-quality starter site to work with.
But that’s not the only thing that makes Soledad shine. This theme comes with a variety of tools to help you scale your magazine with ease. For instance, it includes an AI content creator, text-to-speech audio clip generator, and RSS aggregator so you can import content from other sources.
The Fox is an intuitive WordPress theme built so that you can focus on getting your magazine online quickly. This will enable you to spend your time on what matters most — writing and publishing content.
One of the unique things about this theme is that it doesn’t come with any third-party page builder plugins. Nor are you left with using Gutenberg. Instead, The Fox has its own fast and easy to use page builder (including header and footer builders), which lives inside of the WordPress Customizer. So, your building experience will be fast and convenient.
Xoxo is not going to be for everyone. That said, if you’re feeling underwhelmed by other magazine and blog themes and feel like you’ll have to spend inordinate amounts of time customizing them to fit your one-of-a-kind style, this is a great one to consider.
Xoxo would be a particularly good choice for creatives and content creators. It comes with the basic tools you need for a personal blog or magazine, including different post formats for image galleries, videos, audio, and more. So if you want to showcase your custom artwork, photography or videography, music, or podcast episodes alongside your content, this theme makes it easy.
Zeen is a great choice if you’re looking for a high-quality magazine WordPress theme. With dozens of stylish and fast pre-built websites to choose from, you’ll have a rock-solid foundation to start from.
This theme is also a good pick if you’re serious about monetizing your publication. You’ll have numerous ways to do it. For starters, you can add a shop with WooCommerce. You also have the ability to create paywalled content with Restrict Content Pro. And you can embed Google Adsense ads and share sponsored content throughout your site.
Have you found the best WordPress magazine theme for your publication?
Creating a high-quality, high-performance magazine website is no simple task. Thankfully, there are tons of amazing magazine WordPress themes to choose from.
If you haven’t found the perfect WordPress theme from the selection above, take a look through ThemeForest’s other high-quality magazine themes as well as Envato’s magazine templates. There are so many unique styles and creative solutions to be found here.
Also, you don’t have to limit yourself to magazine themes specifically. What you’re looking for may be in a different niche. From blog to newspaper themes, to niche magazine themes for fashion and travel, there’s so much to choose from.