With the boom of digital media, blogs and online magazines are the most visited websites nowadays. With an online magazine, you usually have multiple contributors and a much more hectic publication schedule.Their structure shares a lot of similarities, but they’re not identical. That is why a well-built and professionally designed magazine WordPress themes can help adapt to the fast pace.
Magazine themes often include powerful search and post categorization features. They let your readers navigate through vast troves of content to find precisely what they need quickly.
Depending on which magazine WordPress theme you use, you might even be able to charge your readers for subscriptions, or include advertisements. What monetization method to use is up to you, but the right theme should adapt to your preferred strategy.
In this roundup, we’ll introduce our ten favorite magazine themes for WordPress. Let’s help you set up an online publication!
Pixwell can be a bit intimidating at first, due to the sheer number of features it includes. It’s a theme built for any online magazine that contains a vast library of content. To help your readers navigate the site, Pixwell includes bookmark functionality, as well as ‘trending’ and ‘recent posts’ sections.
To style your magazine, you can choose from dozens of pre-built designs. Every layout is fully customizable using the theme’s custom builder or third-party tools such as Elementor. Pixwell also integrates well with WooCommerce, which means you can sell online subscriptions or products to your magazine’s readers.
If you want to set up a foodie magazine, Pixwell enables you to feature gorgeous recipes, which visitors can react to using a system similar to Facebook’s. Regardless of what type of content you want to publish, this theme lets you guide users towards related posts, increasing their time on site.
Price: A one-year license starts at $29.
Newsmag has a default design that wouldn’t look out of place for a local newspaper’s website. Using this theme, you can include dozens of headlines and photographs on your front page and ensure that each of them will stand out.
This theme also bundles its own page builder tool, called tagDiv composer. It’s a front-end editor, which makes Newsmag a solid choice if you don’t like dealing with code or having to jump back to the WordPress dashboard.
Newsmag also comes with multiple custom widgets, including weather, newsletter, and exchange rate tickers. It’s easy to include author boxes alongside each article, and you can monetize your website through Google Ads.
Price: A one-year license starts at $49.
Digiqole offers an interesting mix of both old-school magazine designs and cutting-edge styles. You’re free to choose whichever look fits your publication best. Where this theme really shines, however, is when it comes to the included features.
There are tons of extras you can add to your posts to make them more engaging. For example, Digiqole comes with its own ratings system, a reading progress bar for each post, and a light and dark mode. You can even set a custom width for your magazine across the board, which is something few themes offer.
As far as support for other plugins goes, Digiqole works seamlessly with Elementor. However, it’s also designed so you can use the Block Editor, and not miss out on much beyond some custom blocks. It’s also perfect for magazines with a broad number of sections, since it includes its own ‘mega menu’ system.
Price: A one-year license starts at $35.
The Issue is a double-threat theme that works for both magazine and blogs. That’s possible because it ships with dozens of pre-built designs for both types of projects.
For magazine websites, The Issue lets you customize your news feed with over 50 unique layout elements and grid styles. If your feed is mostly image-based, you also get access to custom styles that let you transform galleries into lists.
Of course, no magazine can reach its full potential without the power of social media. That’s why The Issue comes with multiple social integration options, ranging from share buttons to profile links for each of your writers. Readers can also see how many times each article has been shared, and react to it using an emoticon-based system.
Price: A one-year license starts at $59.
Voice comes with advanced navigation and categorization settings, which make exploring your magazine much easier. This theme lets you create ‘smart’ listings and custom combinations of post categories. You can display them on your news feed using dozens of unique layouts, and choose specific styles for each listing type.
For longer articles, Voice enables you to break them down into multiple pages. There’s also a built-in ad system, which means you can display more advertisements on each single article.
That’s not all, however – Voice includes a co-author system that lets you assign individual articles to multiple contributors. The theme also comes with its own review system, which lets you display scores from one to five for multiple criteria.
Price: A one-year license starts at $69.
The Voux is perfect for the most entrepreneurial fashion writers, as it comes with a broad selection of monetization methods you can use. With The Voux, you can get paid-for video views, transform images into shopping buttons, include ‘Shop the Post’ boxes for multiple items, and more.
Ultimately, the goal of this theme is to help you build a fashion magazine that earns multiple streams of income. To make that possible, it uses WooCommerce and includes several other tools, including options to help you create custom lightboxes, infinitely-loading pages, and more.
All of that comes with dozens of pre-built magazine designs that you can choose from. Each of them can be fine-tuned using the WPBakery Visual Composer plugin.
Price: A one-year license starts at $59.
Magazines need an audience to bloom, which means that finding lots of readers is vital. GoodLife is designed to help you do that, using an SEO-friendly structure and design.
GoodLife is built for high performance, which search engines take into account. This theme also supports Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), which can help boost your magazine in the rankings even further. When combined with SEO-optimized content, this strong base can do a lot to improve your visibility.
Of course, those aren’t the only features on offer. GoodLife is bundled together with multiple premium plugins, including Maintenance Pro and Essential Grid. It also includes multiple ad placement locations, which gives you plenty of ways to monetize your posts.
When it comes to design, GoodLife offers 14 unique demo websites. These can help you build several niche sites much more quickly, such as sports, fashion, and gaming magazines.
Price: A one-year license starts at $59.
Bimber is one of the most versatile magazine themes you can use if you want to create a site with an attention-grabbing look. The theme ships with pre-built designs that mimic all sorts of popular websites, including Reddit, BuzzFeed, and YouTube.
In every case, these designs take clear inspiration from other sites, but Bimber puts its own unique twist on each one. This theme is also built for performance, and it works perfectly with most WordPress caching plugins and lazy loading tools. It also supports AMP integration, to make your magazine posts load faster.
Bimber is also one of the only magazine themes that integrates with community-building plugins such as BuddyPress. That makes it a perfect option if you want to foster discussion around the articles you publish.
Price: A one-year license starts at $59.
Jannah is a multi-language theme that features one of the most ecclectic collections of designs you can could hope to choose from. With Jannah, you get pre-built layouts for cryptocurrency magazines, photography blogs, recipe portals, and much more.
All of Jannah’s creations follow modern design sensibilities, which is key if you want to attract a young audience. The theme is easy to customize using the default Block Editor, and it comes with a collection of custom blocks to make your life easier.
Among those blocks, you’ll have options for setting up blog feeds and co-author boxes, which is perfect for an online magazine. Jannah also happens to be one of the more mobile-friendly themes we’ve tested so far, which matters since many readers are likely to peruse your content on their phones.
Price: A one-year license starts at $59.
Newspaper has the distinction of being the best-selling premium WordPress magazine theme of all time, and it’s easy to see why. Few other themes give you the freedom to pack as much information into a single page as Newspaper does.
That trend applies to all of Newspaper’s 90+ pre-built magazine designs. Some layouts are more modern than others, but they all share similar features. Newspaper was designed to help you create your magazine using the front-end tagDiv Composer editor, which is remarkably easy to use.
With Newspaper, you can also get multiple header and footer options, depending on what information you want to include. This theme also pairs nicely with online advertising, with AdSense support included out of the box.
In addition, Newspaper comes with a broad range of widgets to make your magazine feel more dynamic. Those include options for social counters, Instagram feeds, exchange rate tickers, weather monitoring, and many more features.
Price: A one-year license starts at $59.
Conclusion
Launching a successful online magazine involves a lot of work. You need to manage multiple collaborators, keep up a steady publication schedule, and above all, ensure that your website is a joy to use. Which magazine theme you use will play a large role in shaping that experience.
Fortunately, there are plenty of amazing magazine themes to choose from. If you’re planning on publishing dozens of articles per week, you can’t go wrong with Newspaper. For a more modern take on online publications, we’d recommend that you check out Voice.
Have you tried any of these magazine themes, and what did you think of them? Share your thoughts in the comments section below!
