17 Best Free WordPress Magazine Themes and Templates 2021

Are you in search of free WordPress magazine themes and templates? If it is so, then you’ve landed at the right place.

Magazine themes are suitable layouts that are designed specifically for magazine websites and blogs. Generally, magazine websites are rich in content and include audio and videos. So, it’s very necessary to choose an appropriate magazine theme that can elegantly showcase website content.

There’re tons of WordPress magazine themes and templates available. And many of them are free. But, choosing the best one can be quite tough. That’s why we’re here to make it easier for you.

In this article, we’ve come up with a list of the best free WordPress magazine themes and templates for 2021. 

Let’s get started!

Things to consider while choosing WordPress Magazine Themes and Templates

There are things that should be taken into account while choosing a convenient magazine theme. Here’s a list of major things to consider:

• User-friendly and Responsive – Magazine themes should be easy to use and they also need to be compatible with any devices that visitors use.
• Unique Layout – The layout of the theme is what sets it apart from other magazines. 
• Well Structured Template – The selected template should be well structured  in design. It grabs the viewer’s attention and reinforces them to visit the site time and again.
• Variety of Editing Options – Tons of editing options in the theme make it more functional that fulfill your goal of creating an effective magazine site.
• Easy Customization – Magazine themes that are easily customizable and go along with the most popular WordPress plugins make it simple for use and fruitful.

If you’re still looking for more ideas to consider, then read our in-depth guide on how to choose a WordPress theme?

Now, let’s move forward to the best Free WordPress magazine themes and templates for 2021.

17 Best Free WordPress Magazine Themes and Templates for 2021

Here, we’ve handpicked a list of the best free WordPress magazine themes and templates for 2021. You can go through the description and features stated below and choose the best one as per your necessity.

1. ColorMag

ColorMag is the most popular and free WordPress magazine theme with 100K+ active installations. It contains 25+ ready-to-use starter templates with a one-click demo import. Furthermore, this helps you create an unimaginable layout for your magazine site with convenience.

This theme is fully responsive and compatible with any devices that your visitor will use. It works great for any type of website including news, magazine, publishing, newspaper, and more. Also, it’s a fully SEO-optimized WordPress theme with 1200+ five-star ratings on the WordPress themes repository. 

Key Features:

• Fully compatible with major page builder plugins like Elementor, Gutenberg, SiteOrigin, etc.
• Easy customization with color choices, custom header support, content slider, and more.
• Beautifully designed themes to make your site outstanding and unique.
• It also works great with languages written in RTL direction and is also translation-ready.
• Comes with a footer copyright editor option that removes or changes your info text as you wish.
• Integrated with WooCommerce plugin including specified layout options for it.

2. Hueman

Hueman is one of the best-rated, simple, and easy-to-use magazine themes for WordPress. It’s designed to make your content appear more attractive and eye-catching with its 100% high-resolution feature. Also, its awesome sharpness goes along with retina-ready screens.

Moreover, you can feature your newly published post in large size on the front page to grab the quick attention of viewers. Also, you can easily showcase videos, images and choose good-looking fonts to make an elegant site.

Key Features

• Easy changes on the website through live customizer.
• Comes with social media icons, custom logo, page layouts, content slider, and more.
• Flexible layout options with a single sidebar to each side.
• Extensive styling options with header, footer, body backgrounds, and colors.
• Choose from 0-4 footer widget columns as per space requirement.
• Styling options with boxed layout style and full-width style.

3. HitMag

HitMag is an elegant and trending free WordPress theme that fulfills all of the basic requirements that are necessary for magazine sites. Specifically, it’s framed for newspapers, magazines, and even personal blogs. It comes with a header slider where you can showcase your freshly published and influential posts.

Moreover, it has the most mandatory widget areas like the main sidebar, an advertisement bar, three-footer sidebars, and more. This helps you to make an effective and functional website.

Key Features

• Includes thumbnail navigation of the slider that highlights important information in slides.
• Provides 4 different post layouts i.e. 2 columns grid, 3 columns grid, list, and large post layout to present your blog posts.
• It has options to easily upload a logo and settings are available for background colors, theme color, and so on.
• This theme helps you to showcase your contents in an organized way with a homepage widget area and 3 great post widgets.
• Fully responsive and mobile-ready design.

4. Poseidon

Poseidon is a sophisticatedly built WordPress theme that has a spacious white layout. Not only that, it comes with an impressive full-screen image slideshow and clean typography. Furthermore, this helps in sharing your content more elegantly.

It’s a fully responsive and mobile-ready layout that works amazingly on any screen size and device. Moreover, it provides a magazine home page template that builds an amazing homepage of your site easily within seconds.

Key Features:

• Comes with an attractive full-screen image slider that focuses on influential posts.
• Flexible customization to choose slide’s category, animation effect, speed, and a number of slider posts.
• Choose theme colors, fonts, header spacing from its own theme options panel.
• Built with SEO-optimized code to increase your site’s traffic.
• General Public Licensed (GPL) that allows users to run, study, share and modify the theme.

5. Magbook

Magbook is a clean and flexible WordPress theme crafted specifically for newspapers, magazines, publishing, blogs, or review sites. The best part is, it comes with ready-to-use demo content with a one-click website demos importer. This leads to an easy setup of the website.

It has many notable qualities like the variety of layout options, gallery templates, widgets, sidebar, and so on. It’s all devices friendly and is fully responsive which results in a picture-perfect website. Not to mention, it renders lifetime free updates.

Key Features:

• It is compatible with cross browsers which helps visitors to view your site from all popular browsers.
• You can choose from multiple layouts for individual posts or pages.
• It provides social media icons so that your content gets shared on social media platforms.
• Choose the color of your wish from infinite color options.
• Magbook has been extensively optimized for super-fast loading.

6. MH Magazine lite

MH Magazine lite is one of the most popular and dynamic WordPress themes that take your website to the next level. Actually, it’s the free version of the MH Magazine WordPress theme with all the required basic functions. Essentially, it’s a fully responsive layout and is built all devices friendly.

This lite version is perfect to create attractive online magazines, professional blogs, and news websites in no time. This theme assists to import or make stunning call-to-action buttons for your post. Moreover, it’s quick loading and secured.

Key Features:

• Provides multiple blog layout options to choose the best suitable layout.
• Easy Customization through custom widgets like MH Custom Posts, MH Slider, MH Social, MH Spotlight, and more.
• You can manage and control your site’s search collection with several archive pages.
• Integration with social media platforms that help you connect to site visitors.
• Comes with a unique post system to improve users’ experience on the site.

7. Viral

Viral is one of the stylish, flexible, and lightweight WordPress themes. Basically, it’s designed specifically for magazines, news portals, publishing, blogs, and review sites. It comes with a simple drag and drop layout building, making creating a site more easy and simple.

This theme has very detailed documentation and video tutorials that help to build your site without hurdles. Moreover, it has 3 different banner styles to promote your featured content and a promotional header.

Key Features:

• Compatible with AMP plugins that make it load 5 times faster on mobile devices.
• Choose the required font from varieties of typography options.
• Easy adjustment of theme’s color using color picker option.
• Live preview of the customization while setting up the website.
• 20+ uniquely designed templates for Elementor to create an elegant-looking website.
• 5 different built-in widgets that can be used in sidebars and footers.

8. NewsMag

NewsMag is the clean, modern layout WordPress theme that displays your articles and posts in a mesmerizing way. It’s fully responsive as it’s all device-friendly. On top of that, it offers enough ad space for making money out of the efforts given to the site.

Moreover, it provides amazing font icons to erase the monotony of the text. You can add sidebar widgets, four-column footer widgets, and unlimited widgets in each sidebar and footer column. Also, the contact form and Google maps can be included on the contact page.

Key Features:

• Live editing can be done on the front page in terms of headers, menus, contents, and layouts.
• Easy drag and drop the elements and arrange them on your website.
• GDPR Compliant that makes your site integrated with international regulations regarding data privacy.
• Provides weather widgets that can be perfect for news sites and exchange widgets for international sites.
• Allows you to add a YouTube/Vimeo video playlist which makes your site outstanding from the rest.

9. Dynamic News Lite

Dynamic News Lite is the free, trending, and multipurpose website theme, particularly for blogging and magazines. It comes with bold colors and fonts. Essentially, it has some eye-catching organized modules for showing your content to readers.

Not to mention, it has a responsive layout, magazine page template, and featured content slider. This will help you showcase your freshly published stories of the week in an attractive way.

Key Features:

• Provide a customizer for all kinds of theme-related settings such as layout settings, header content, and post settings.
• Easily add colored social media icons and search box to header area.
• Comes with custom menus, custom backgrounds, and custom header images.
• Offers beautiful flat design and bold typography with a full-width template.
• Translation-ready theme to be used for any language site.

10. MagazineNP

MagazineNP serves as one of the cleanest and elegant free WordPress magazine themes. As its widget-based theme, it can easily be customized from customizer settings or widgets panel. Importantly, it includes modern designs and is compatible with popular SEO WordPress plugins to make it a fully optimized theme.

You can easily set up a magazine-style homepage theme without much lengthy process. Additionally, it’s built compatible with popular page builders like Elementor and eCommerce plugins like WooCommerce. This makes it a more effective theme.

Key Features:

• Comes with a featured slider to showcase important posts with featured images.
• Provides post grid widget for grid layout.
• Easy set up of site via one-click demo import of different starter sites.
• Offers specialized theme style home widget to get all widgets for homepage.
• Post Column Layout with filter category.
• Fully responsive to auto adjust on all screens.

11. Refined Magazine

Refined Magazine is one of the finest and lightweight WordPress themes that takes your existing website to another height. It comes with a great layout for blog columns and headings. Also, it does offer advertisement space on the home and inner pages of your site.

Moreover, it’s a minimal theme with a slider, promo boxes, newsletter section, multiple menu positions, and more. It offers a one-click demo import. With it, you can set up your site easily and conveniently. It has 5 free demos for multiple types of magazine sites like food, fashion, tech, etc.

Key Features:

• Offers 9 extra custom widgets and countless color possibilities.
• Provides post format design for image, video, audio, and gallery.
• Varieties of menus such as top header menu, primary menu, and social menu.
• Allows social link just before the footer widgets.
• Provides a “Go-to-Top” icon to directly reach the top of the site from the last article section.

12. EnterNews

EnterNews is one of the best flexible WordPress themes for news and magazines. It comes with basic and dark color options to present your articles in a stylish way. Furthermore, it’s built to improve your site’s search engine ranking.

It’s ideal for news, newspaper, magazine, review sites, and blogging platforms. Also, it includes tons of free starter sites that can be imported with a single click. This helps to create a stunning news website.

Key Features:

• 8+ custom widgets and widget sections to customize site content.
• Compatible with Gutenberg WordPress blocks and other major plugins.
• RTL and translation-ready multilingual theme.
• Live customizer to preview the changes in the site.
• Supports a range of modern web browsers including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and others. 

13. Madd Magazine

Madd Magazine is a versatile and fully responsive WordPress theme crafted for magazines, professional blogs, or newspapers. It comes with a responsive slider that can be used to display images or videos. This theme provides your website a magazine-like appearance in a few clicks.

It’s a professionally coded magazine theme with a gorgeous look that is very easy to use and set up. Not to mention, it’s a lightweight and well-coded magazine theme. Furthermore, this improves the professionalism of your site.

Key Features

• Provides a lovely frontend interface with lots of room for your content.
• Contains the left and right sidebar to put your favorite widgets.
• Google fonts are included for best typography.
• Comes with a variety of slider and button colors.
• Easy access to your articles as it’s compatible with all major browsers.
• Offers advertising space to profit from your work.

14. Magazine News Byte

Magazine News Byte is a free WordPress theme for content-driven magazine sites. It has tons of customization options and quick loading performance. It’s a responsive design theme. Additionally, it contains retina-friendly symbols to ensure that every pixel looks fantastic. 

This theme is functional and powerful with a plethora of cutting-edge features. Moreover, it’s compatible with major plugins like WooCommerce, Yoast SEO, Contact Form 7, and more.

Key Features:

• Create your own unique site with several widgets, spaces and style, color, and typography options.
• Gives multiple logo options with one-line description space.
• Includes 991 icons that can be used in widgets and options panels.
• Choose from the boxed layout or stretched layout to portray your content.
• Select from multiple sidebar and footer layouts for different sections of your site.

15. Metro Magazine

Metro Magazine is a free modern WordPress theme aimed towards news and magazine websites. It has a responsive interface that makes it appear great on any device. It uses trendy fonts and colors that emphasize images and typography.

It’s an SEO-friendly theme that puts your content in the spotlight to drive more traffic to your site. Furthermore, it’s integrated with social media. This encourages people to share your site’s content on social media. Not to miss out, it does offer advertising space.

Key Features:

• Based on customizer for quick and easy website customization and live previews.
• Translation-ready theme for removing the language barrier.
• Speed optimized to load your site quickly and efficiently.
• Offer 3 widget areas on the footer and tons of widgets in the sidebar.
• Provides author bio space to give credit to your content creators.

16. PT Magazine

PT Magazine is a user-friendly theme that works excellent for news and magazine websites. It includes neatly boxed layouts that are ideal for posting articles and blogs. This theme is well suited for a variety of topics like technology, fashion, politics, sports, travel, and more.

It works with a variety of translation widgets and plugins. This prepares your website for translation. Moreover, its social media integration facilitates quick social sharing of your site’s content.

Key Features

• Responsive layout to give the best view on all devices.
• Provides featured slider, custom menu, and full-width template on the homepage.
• Showcase your unique featured posts with a featured post option.
• Quickly upload the official logo of your site with a simple button click.
• Retina-ready display theme to provide sharper and clear image and resolution.
• Supports multiple posts formats to retain users on your site.

17. Silk Lite

Silk Lite is a playful and light-hearted magazine-style WordPress theme crafted especially for fashion bloggers. Moreover, it’s really a renowned theme for its well-designed layout and dynamic animations. It’s a responsive theme that looks fantastic on any device.

Somehow this theme looks like a Pinterest as it brings professional and joyful vibes to your site. Additionally, it works perfectly to express your own views and latest discoveries. Not only that but it can also be used to keep a photo scrapbook.

Key Features:

• Multiple columns and sidebars to accommodate a large number of contents.
• Provides threaded comments section to get feedback from users.
• Select fonts from Google fonts to create elegant and readable posts.
• Menu at the top of the header to add links to your social media profiles.
• Enable or disable the search option in the top header bar as per your choice.
• Adds an image background with a custom sidebar widget.

Conclusion

With that, we’ve reached the end of this article. We did our best to compile a list of top free WordPress magazine themes and templates for 2021. We sincerely hope you enjoyed it.

WordPress magazine themes are really the life savior for magazine websites and blogs. Magazine websites, on the whole, have a lot of content, including images, audio, and video. Importantly, it requires advertising space to generate income out of their efforts.

As a result, picking relevant magazine themes is critical. We genuinely wish this article aids you in selecting the best magazine themes and templates for your site.

Do you still have any questions or concerns about WordPress Magazine themes and templates? Then please do not hesitate to write a comment below. We’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Also, do check out our list of Top 12 WordPress Page Builder Plugins for 2021.  Make sure you go it through once. Please forward this article to your friends and family if you enjoyed it. Mind to give us a like on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.