WordPress Newspaper Themes: Top 20 Picks for News Websites

Are you looking for a newspaper theme for your website? With numerous newspaper WordPress themes on the market, choosing the right one for your needs can be challenging.

To help you choose, we’ve compiled the top 20 best WordPress themes for news sites. We’ve based our selection on ratings, features, and support. Some newspaper themes come with many pre-built templates, while others have WooCommerce support or useful tools like Breaking News tickers.

Then, we’ll also show you how to build a newspaper site in WordPress. Let’s get started!

Top 20 WordPress Newspaper Themes

Let’s jump straight into our carefully curated list of the best newspaper WordPress themes for your website.

1. Astra

Astra Stats:

• Rating: 5/5
• Best for: Users looking for a feature-rich, highly customizable newspaper theme
• Price: freemium, with paid plans starting at $47/year

If you’re looking for a versatile, fully customizable design, Astra is the best WordPress theme for you. This highly popular WordPress theme allows you to build entire headers and footers. You can even build a mega menu if you run a large news site.

Key Features:

• Advanced header and footer builder
• A selection of starter templates and blog layouts
• Global color palettes
• Built-in schema markup and native AMP to help your site rank high in search engines
• Support for popular page-builders and membership plugins
• WooCommerce integration

[PREVIEW / DOWNLOAD]

2. Soledad

Soledad Stats:

• Rating: 4.9/5
• Best for: Newspaper websites looking for a wide array of ready-made templates and a live blogging feature
• Price: $59/license

Soledad is a professional WordPress theme for newspapers with multiple homepage layouts. Its unique Penci Live Blog plugin allows you to update articles in real-time, so visitors can read new content without refreshing the page.

Integrated with AI technology, Soledad also lets you generate content based on keywords. Plus, it can suggest unique article titles and generate images straight from your WordPress dashboard.

Key Features:

• Thousands of homepage demos
• Multiple header and footer builders
• Mega menu builder
• Text-to-speech plugin
• AI smart content generator
• Post paywall system
• Schema markup
• In-feed ads
• WooCommerce compatibility

[PREVIEW / DOWNLOAD]

3. SmartMag

SmartMag Stats:

• Rating: 4.8/5
• Best for: Users prioritizing social sharing on their newspaper website
• Price: $59/license

If you’re looking to boost engagement on your newspaper website, SmartMag is the best WordPress theme for you. This theme lets you add a floating social share icon and a share bar at the end of the articles.

Plus, the WordPress theme supports official widgets, like Facebook Like. SmartMag is also mobile-friendly and supports live search, so users can see suggested results as they type their queries.

Key Features:

• Over 37 one-click demos
• Different pagination options, including infinite scroll and the load more button
• 3 mega menus
• Dark mode and scheme switcher
• Unlimited colors and typography options
• Social media integration
• Auto-load next posts
• Built-in trending news ticker for headers

[PREVIEW / DOWNLOAD]

4. Hive

Hive Stats:

• Rating: 4.7/5
• Best for: Newspaper websites that aim for a minimalist design
• Price: €75/year

Hive offers a clean design that makes it an excellent choice for modern newspaper websites. You can arrange your content in a beautiful masonry layout that adapts seamlessly to various elements, including text and images.

This stylish WordPress theme is a great choice for beginners since you can make all modifications to the layout within the WordPress Customizer. Plus, thanks to the intuitive Style Manager, you can apply color schemes and typography sets in a single click.

Key Features:

• Custom typography elements
• Adaptive layouts
• Style Manager to set color palettes and fonts
• Easy translations
• Fully responsive design
• Excellent customer support

[PREVIEW / DOWNLOAD]

5. Jannah

Jannah Stats:

• Rating: 4.8/5
• Best for: Users that want to build a speedy newspaper website
• Price: $59/license

Jannah is a powerful newspaper theme designed to deliver fast loading times and WordPress search engine optimization (SEO) boosts. One of the many ways the theme achieves this is by removing extra CSS and JavaScript from plugins like WooCommerce and BuddyPress.

Additionally, you can enable lazy loading to improve content delivery across your site.

Key Features:

• Smart Detector to reduce bounce rate
• Lazy load AdSense ads to improve website speed
• Support for bbPress, WooCommerce, and BuddyPress
• Customizable widget styles
• Sticky Share buttons
• Auto Loads Posts system
• Day/Night mode toggle
• Translates into 10 languages
• Mobile live search

[PREVIEW / DOWNLOAD]

6. Divi

Divi Stats:

• Rating: 4.9/5
• Best for: Users who want a beginner-friendly yet highly customizable newspaper theme
• Price: $89/year

Divi is a great choice for beginners. This multi-purpose, feature-packed WordPress theme lets you download full website packs that contain all the key pages for your website. Plus, you can import pre-made designs for blocks or modules.

Divi is an excellent theme if you want total control over your layout. It’s also simple to modify your design, thanks to its intuitive drag-and-drop builder. You can even bulk-edit multiple elements at once.

Key Features:

• Visual drag-and-drop website builder
• In-line text editing
• Fully responsive
• Global elements and styles
• Over 2,000 pre-made designs
• Over 200 full website packs
• Monarch social sharing
• Split testing

[PREVIEW / DOWNLOAD]

7. Indigo

Indigo Stats:

• Rating: 5/5
• Best for: Users who want a straightforward newspaper theme
• Price: $59

Indigo is one of the simplest WordPress newspaper themes, making it a great choice for beginners. It’s easy to install, and you can import demo templates with just one click.

Plus, it’s easy to customize the layout using the advanced theme panel options. The visual customizer lets you quickly swap colors and fonts to reflect your unique branding.

Key Features:

• One-click demo importer
• Fully responsive
• WooCommerce support
• Custom widgets sidebar
• Featured slider
• Fully translatable
• Floating social sharing bar

[PREVIEW / DOWNLOAD]

8. News Portal

News Portal Stats:

• Rating: 5/5
• Best for: Newspaper websites that prioritize fully responsive layouts
• Price: freemium, with paid plans starting at $59.99/license

News Portal is another customizable WordPress newspaper theme. It comes with a selection of widgets for your magazine layouts. You can also make adjustments to the layout with the advanced theme options and create multiple color schemes.

Key Features:

• Built-in live customizer
• Multiple color schemes
• Post Review system
• Multiple header layouts
• WooCommerce compatible

[PREVIEW / DOWNLOAD]

9. TheGem

TheGem Stats:

• Rating: 4.9/5
• Best for: Users who want to fine-tune the website design with numerous ready-made templates
• Price: $59

TheGem makes it easy to edit your site. You can mix and match more than 400 demo templates and 300 pre-made page sections. Then, customize further with over 30 unique custom elements like quick finders and progress bars.

This WordPress theme can be translated into any language. It also integrates with many useful plugins, like WooCommerce and Events Calendar.

Key Features:

• Over 400 pre-built demos
• Integration with WPBakery and Elementor
• Header and footer builder
• WooCommerce Theme Builder
• Smart display conditions
• Mega menu builder
• Pop-up builder
• SEO-friendly markup
• Translation-ready

[PREVIEW / DOWNLOAD]

10. Domino Magazine

Domino Magazine Stats:

• Rating: 5/5
• Best for: Newspaper websites that focus on reporting hard news
• Price: $69/year

Domino Magazine is a WordPress theme for newspapers that includes one-click demo installs, WooCommerce support, and a beginner-friendly visual builder.

It also offers features that make it especially useful for hard news websites. For example, you’ll get a Breaking News ticker to quickly highlight current events across the top of your page.

Key Features:

• Dynamic homepage builder
• Multi-purpose custom widgets, including categories and ads
• Jetpack features like Tiled Galleries and Related Posts
• Boxed layout

[PREVIEW / DOWNLOAD]

11. ColorMag

ColorMag Stats:

• Rating: 5/5
• Best for: Small or budget-conscious newspaper websites
• Price: Free

ColorMag offers eight free starter templates that cover several industries, including sports, fashion, health, and entertainment. You can choose between full-width or boxed layouts.

This free WordPress newspaper theme offers a lot of monetization potential. There are multiple spaces to slot various ads into your pages.

Key Features:

• WPML compatible, so you can easily translate your site
• WooCommerce-ready
• Custom widgets
• Sticky menu

[PREVIEW / DOWNLOAD]

12. Prime News

Prime News Stats:

• Rating: 5/5
• Best for: Newspaper websites that want to display multiple post formats, including video
• Price: $69/year

Like other WPZOOM WordPress themes, Prime News comes with one-click demo installs. It also offers a featured video section where you can highlight your content against a dark background.

Plus, there are many customization options, including pre-built color schemes and unique widgets.

Key Features:

• Featured video section
• Various slider styles
• Social media widgets
• Multiple ad zones
• Breaking News ticker

[PREVIEW / DOWNLOAD]

13. Editorial

Editorial Stats:

• Rating: 5/5
• Best for: Users who want to design their website using the WordPress Customizer
• Price: freemium, with paid plans starting at $59.99/license

Editorial is a responsive newspaper WordPress theme with a powerful free version.

This theme is fully adjustable using the WordPress Customizer, so you don’t need to install any page builder plugin.

With Editorial, you get a lot of color and typography options. Plus, you can build multiple header layouts for your online newspaper. For extra features and templates, upgrade to Editorial Pro.

Key Features:

• WooCommerce integration
• Preloader
• Post review system
• Multiple color options
• Over 11 magazine widgets

[PREVIEW / DOWNLOAD]

14. Ceris

Ceris Stats:

• Rating: 4.9/5
• Best for: Newspaper websites that want to encourage reader engagement
• Price: $59/license

Ceris gives you access to over 43 professionally designed templates, including a dedicated newspaper layout. You can choose a template to match your exact industry or build one yourself.

This theme makes it easy for customers to save or bookmark your posts, react with emojis, and rate and review products. It also offers many customization options, including variable font options and flexible spacing between modules.

Key Features:

• Custom font size and spacing
• Flexible header menus
• Ultimate Search Page
• Review features
• WooCommerce-ready
• Infinite scrolling
• Progress bars

[PREVIEW / DOWNLOAD]

15. Newsblock

Newsblock Stats:

• Rating: 4.8/5
• Best for: Users who want advanced features when building a newspaper website
• Price: $69/license

Newblock is a feature-rich theme that helps in creating a news website with WordPress. Some of its notable features include video backgrounds, auto-loading the next posts, and live search results.

This modern WordPress theme provides a flexible editing experience where you can insert forms and ads into different template parts without changing their files. You can also display share buttons and social links to drive traffic to your social media accounts.

Key Features

• Social integrations
• Live search
• AdSense integration
• Optimized CSS styles and lazy loading
• Opt-in forms
• Advanced reviews

[PREVIEW / DOWNLOAD]

16. Digiqole

Digiqole Stats:

• Rating: 4.7/5
• Best for: Users looking for a lightweight news magazine theme
• Price: $29/license

Digiqole is a fast, simple theme that’s ideal for blogs, magazines, and newspaper websites. If you’re looking to get your site set up quickly, you can choose a pre-made template from a huge library of designs.

Key Features

• WooCommerce-ready
• Infinite scroll
• Integration with Elementor builder
• Over 20 block options, including sliders and video tabs
• Unlimited ads
• Built-in mega menu

[PREVIEW / DOWNLOAD]

17. PRESSO

PRESSO Stats:

• Rating: 4.7/5
• Best for: Newspaper websites that want to provide a user-friendly experience with a lot of content
• Price: $45/license

PRESSO is a flexible newspaper theme that stands out for its impressive navigation system. You can implement mega menus, off-canvas menus, and instant search. Plus, this WordPress theme contains plenty of built-in ad locations for your news website.

Key Features

• Optimized for mobile devices
• WooCommerce-ready
• Advanced review system
• Over 40 content blocks
• Advanced typography options
• Different header and site layouts

[PREVIEW / DOWNLOAD]

18. Paperio

Paperio Stats:

• Rating: 4.9/5
• Best for: Newspaper websites that want to target a global audience
• Price: $49/license

Paperio offers sleek, modern designs with easy one-click demo imports. With WPML and POT files included, it’s a great choice for easy translation of international websites.

This WordPress theme lets you choose from multiple header and footer styles, blog listing layouts, fonts, and colors. Plus, you’ll get promotional blocks, social sharing, and video posts.

Key Features

• Audio and video posts
• Responsive sliders
• 6 unique header styles
• 7 pre-built demos
• Stylish hover effects
• Infinite scrolling
• Mailchimp newsletter subscription

[PREVIEW / DOWNLOAD]

19. The Fox

The Fox Stats:

• Rating: 4.8/5
• Best for: Newspaper websites that want to update their articles in real-time
• Price: $59/license

The Fox is one of the few newspaper WordPress themes to offer a live post feature. It allows you to broadcast updates for sports games or display breaking news.

You can also show related posts, auto-load the next posts, and display a reading progress bar. Thanks to the clever built-in sponsored posts feature, it’s easy to earn money online with this theme.

Key Features

• Thousands of typography options
• Elementor integration
• Dark mode
• Unlimited header options
• Mega menu builder
• Live Post feature
• 7 gallery styles
• Built-in view count

[PREVIEW / DOWNLOAD]

20. The Issue

The Issue Stats:

• Rating: 4.6/5
• Best for: Monetization
• Price: $89/license

The Issue is a bold newspaper theme that’s ideal for attracting readers’ attention and monetizing content. You’ll get plenty of advertisement placements and filters where you can insert simple banner ads or AdSense codes.

You can also highlight sponsored content and monetize your own video posts. You can even link directly to external or in-site products with eye-catching “Shop the Post” headings.

Key Features

• Infinite loading
• Lazy loading
• Mega menus
• AJAX live search
• Lightbox galleries
• 10 header styles
• Over 8,000 post layout variations
• Dark and light modes

[PREVIEW / DOWNLOAD]

How to Build a Newspaper Website in WordPress

Now, let’s look at how to build a news website in six easy steps.

1. Get a WordPress Hosting Plan and a Domain Name

First, you’ll need to choose a web host and pick a domain name.

Hostinger’s Premium, Business, and Cloud Startup WordPress hosting plans offer free domain registration. Our hosting solutions also include security tools like caching and firewalls to keep your news website safe.

2. Set Up WordPress

The easiest way to build a website for a newspaper is to choose a web host that will install WordPress for you.

You can also download WordPress manually from the official website. Once downloaded, unzip the file and upload it to the public_html directory of your website using the File Manager. Alternatively, use an FTP client like FileZilla.

3. Select and Install Your Chosen Newspaper Theme

Once you’ve installed WordPress, access the dashboard and go to Appearance → Themes.

If it’s a free theme in the WordPress directory, click on Add New and search for it. Then, click on Install and Activate.

If you’ve purchased a premium theme, click on Upload and select the theme’s ZIP file.

4. Customize the Theme

Once the theme is activated, you can further customize the theme’s elements, including its colors, fonts, and widgets.

Typically, a theme will provide a number of pre-built templates, like a homepage and a single post layout. However, you can also set up additional pages by going to Pages → Add New.

For example, you can create a page where customers can find details about your company or submit a message via a contact form. You can also create an About page to share your newspaper’s story and values.

To change the default layout for your homepage or other post layouts, navigate to Appearance → Customize.

The options you see will depend on your current theme. Generally, you should be able to switch typography styles and set up different color palettes. This is a great way to reinforce your branding and personalize your website.

In the Site Identity tab, you can upload the logo for your news site, change your site title, and add a catchy tagline.

5. Set up the Blog and Website Categories

The blog is where you’ll display your news articles. By default, WordPress shows your most recent posts on the homepage.

To change this, click on the Homepage Settings tab in the WordPress Customizer and check the box for A static page. Then, choose a new homepage from the drop-down menu. You can also pick a different page to list your articles under Posts page.

Consider grouping similar posts into categories. This can make it easier for readers to navigate your content. As a newspaper website, you might want to assign posts to local, international, sports, politics, or entertainment categories.

Simply head to Posts → Categories from your dashboard. Then, give your category a name, slug, and description. You can even add subcategories by assigning them to a parent category.

After setting up the categories, you will be able to assign them to your different articles using the Post settings.

6. Install Plugins for Better Site Functionality

While a theme determines the look and feel of your website, WordPress plugins extend its functionality. You can find plenty of quality WordPress plugins in the official directory.

To install a WordPress plugin, go to Plugins → Add New and use the search field to look for your preferred add-on. If you purchased a plugin from a third-party website, upload the ZIP file to WordPress instead.

Here are several plugins we recommend for newspaper websites:

• Orbit Fox. Lets readers share your articles on social media.
• Ditty. Allows you to display sliders and tickers across the site.
• Yoast SEO. Assists in optimizing articles with relevant keywords, improving your visibility in search engine results pages.
• Members. Lets you offer exclusive articles to subscribed readers.

Remember that too many plugins can slow down your website, negatively impacting user experience and SEO. Only install plugins that are essential to your needs.

Conclusion

Before setting up a WordPress news site, it’s important to find the right theme for your needs. A suitable theme helps you reach your content goals and build a base of loyal readers.

In this article, we have explored the top newspaper themes for WordPress. If you want to broadcast live events, The Fox offers a Live Post feature. Meanwhile, Newsblock comes with features like live search and video backgrounds. If you’re on a budget, you can use a free WordPress theme like ColorMag.

Most importantly, make sure your theme is SEO-friendly and optimized for mobile devices. This can help you grow your news website more quickly.

WordPress Newspaper Themes FAQ

Finally, let’s answer some common questions about newspaper WordPress themes.