14 Best WordPress Magazine Themes of 2016

If you have a content rich website and you’re looking for a new theme, then you probably want a WordPress magazine theme. It gives you freedom to break the typical layout and showcase more of your articles, videos, and images. There are hundreds perhaps thousands of magazine style WordPress themes in the market. In this article, we have hand-picked some of the best WordPress magazine themes available.

Getting Started with a WordPress Magazine Theme

First thing you will need to run a WordPress site is a web hosting. Magazine sites are content rich, and you will need to choose a web hosting company that can handle your traffic.

If you are just starting out, then we recommend going with BlueHost. It is one of the best shared hosting company and also one of the official WordPress hosting providers.

If you can afford to spend a little more, then we would recommend you to go with WPEngine. It is a managed WordPress hosting service, which means they will handle everything technical for you.

For more information check our guide on how to choose the best WordPress hosting for your website.

Some of you may already have a WordPress site, and you may just want to switch to a magazine theme. Make sure you understand what happens when you switch your WordPress theme and follow our checklist of 15 things you must do before changing WordPress themes.

Having said that, let’s check out some of the best WordPress magazine themes you can use on your site.

1. Paperback

Paperback is an elegant WordPress magazine theme with tons of awesome features. It is designed to beautifully display content in a magazine layout. It prominently uses featured images from your articles throughout the layout. It also comes with a built-in featured posts slider for the homepage.

It pays special attention to readability across devices, the typography looks equally great on mobile and desktop. It has a category mega menu which displays featured content from those categories beautifully.

Paperback offers multiple color choices, homepage layouts, and slick content discovery features.

2. ModernMag

Modern Mag is a beautiful and modern looking magazine theme for WordPress. It comes with color variations and custom templates to easily build your own custom magazine site with WordPress in minutes.

Modern Mag is SEO friendly by design and it is highly optimized for speed. Faster page loads means better search rankings. It comes with built-in integration of social media making it super easy for you to connect a magazine site to its social pages.

It comes with an easy to use theme customizer which allows you to setup your site with a live preview next to it. Unlike other magazine themes, Modern Mag is bloat free and does not confuse users with overly complicated theme options.

3. Baseline

Baseline is a modern WordPress magazine style theme. It features large images on the homepage, which makes your content more visually stunning.

In the header section it has featured content carousel, a mega menu of categories with images, sliding sidebars, and social media integration.

Typography is one of the most elegant features of the theme. It is beautiful across different devices and improves reading experience. The homepage has one, two, and three column layouts with multiple color options.

4. Poseidon

Poseidon is a free WordPress magazine theme. It comes with a large full-width slider on top, clean typography, and a spacious white layout.

The theme features a magazine homepage layout with custom widgets designed to work on magazine homepage. It also comes with theme-specific options which can be setup using customizer.

5. NewsAnchor Pro

As the name suggests the, NewsAnchor Pro is a WordPress news and magazine theme. It comes with multiple page layouts, including multiple layouts for the homepage.

The theme has three extra widgets for your front page so you can create a complete magazine layout. These widgets are: a posts carousel widget, a featured images widget and a widget that displays four categories.

6. Responz

Responz is a three column news and magazine theme for WordPress. It features an elegant design with great typography and fully responsive layout.

It comes with multiple layout options like 2 sidebars, 1 sidebar, or full width homepage. You can also choose from the list view or grid view post layouts. It has built-in sliders, custom widgets, and shortcodes.

7. Oblique

Oblique is a free magazine WordPress theme with a beautiful masonry layout. It features a beautiful parallax header, unlimited color choices, homepage templates, etc.

8. Magazine PRO

Magazine pro is premium WordPress magazine theme by StudioPress. It is built on top of Genesis theme framework, which means it comes with rock solid code.

The theme comes with multiple page templates for homepage, blog, and landing pages. It has three widgetized areas for homepage. It is easy to customize and setup using theme customizer.

9. Candid

Candid is a beautiful WordPress magazine theme designed to tell rich content stories. The theme focuses on improved readability with beautiful typography that looks great on all devices.

The homepage comes with a masonry layout that can be one, two, or three column layouts. It also supports infinite scroll, which lets your visitors seamlessly load more of your content without leaving the page.

10. Domino Magazine

Domino Magazine is a highly customizable WordPress magazine theme. The homepage features multiple widgetized areas and a dynamic page builder. It comes with built-in news ticker, weather widget, and a tabbed widget.

The theme also allows you to easily add custom background, headers, sliders, and your own logo.

11. Hueman

Hueman is a popular free WordPress theme beautiful magazine style layout. It comes with multiple page templates giving you the option to choose between two or three column layouts.

It also allows users to toggle sidebars to create more reading space. Hueman has a theme options panel which allows you to fully customize it to match your needs.

12. Author

Author is a premium WordPress theme designed for writers, bloggers, and authors. It features a spacious layout with lots of white space and beautiful typography.

It has a featured post carousel to display your most important content on the top. It allows you to use videos and images as featured images for your articles. It has built-in support for galleries, beautiful image displays, pullquotes, and much more to elegantly enhance reading experience.

13. ColorMag

ColorMag is a beautiful free WordPress magazine theme. It feature 15+ widget ready areas with 6 custom widgets which allow you to setup your site in many different ways. It also has multiple color options and the ability to set a primary color for your theme.

14. Alpha

Alpha is powerful WordPress news/magazine style theme. It comes with two skins for magazine or news websites. Each skin will radically change your site’s layout and you can choose the one that meets your needs.

Among other features, it comes with a breaking news ticker and a custom slider. It also comes with a video widget to showcase your video content on the homepage.

We hope this list helped you choose the best WordPress magazine theme for your website. You may also want to see our list of 10 WordPress plugins that will quickly help you get more traffic

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