17 Best Free WordPress News Themes of 2024

Blossom Magazine is a versatile WordPress theme ideally suited for crafting news websites. It offers diverse layout options and typography control to help you build a stunning news website.

This theme seamlessly integrates with Elementor and Gutenberg, the leading drag-and-drop page builders for WordPress. This feature allows you to create a customized layout for your news website without needing to touch any code.

The theme offers various sections, like a built-in newsletter section, to help you capture leads and grow your audience. Furthermore, WooCommerce compatibility allows you to set up an online store and explore monetization opportunities alongside your news content.

Finally, Blossom Magazine is translation-ready and supports RTL scripts, making it a great choice for websites targeting international audiences.

Elegant Pink is a free WordPress theme with a feminine style and a vibrant masonry design layout like Pinterest. It’s clean and eye-catching, making it perfect for websites that cater to women or cover lifestyle and entertainment news.

Furthermore, this theme is built for speed. Its lightweight design ensures fast loading times, keeping your website user-friendly and engaging for visitors.

Elegant Pink comes with infinite scroll functionality. As they reach the bottom of the page, new content loads automatically, keeping them hooked and wanting to see more.

Additionally, Elegant Pink is also translation-ready, allowing you to reach a broader audience by translating your website into different languages.

It also works great with popular social media sites, so your readers can share your news and help you grow your online fan base.

Vilva stands out as one of the best free WordPress themes for news websites. It is a highly customizable theme dedicated to news, magazines, fashion, beauty, travel, food, or sports websites. The theme brings elegant design and multiple personalization options to the table.

Vilva provides pre-built layouts for headers, blogs, single posts, banners, and archives to add much-needed elements to your site. The theme also lets you add a video or image to the slider banner.

Furthermore, Vilva grants you extensive control over individual page customization. You can choose to hide or show elements like categories, post author, post date, featured images, and related posts.

Finally, this theme includes social media integration, a dedicated Instagram section, and a newsletter section to help you capture leads and grow your website’s audience.

Metro Magazine is a lively WordPress theme, making it a great choice for websites in niches like magazines, blogs, lifestyle, and more.

The theme boasts a center-aligned layout, putting your content front and center. Additionally, it comes with five essential widgets for news websites: Recent Posts, Featured Posts, Popular Posts, and Social Links. These widgets help you showcase your content effectively.

The free version of Metro Magazine includes options for placing header and footer ads, allowing you to monetize your website. The pro version offers even more advanced ad management features, such as an intelligent ad-blocker detector, an ad management system, and dedicated ad widget areas.

Unlike some themes, it is 100% SEO-friendly, helping your website rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). It also features eight social media buttons on each page, making it easy for visitors to share your content.

One of Metro Magazine’s standout features is its extensive documentation and quick support, ensuring you get the most out of the theme.

Rara Magazine is another excellent WordPress theme for news and magazine websites. It offers an engaging user experience with its elegant and user-friendly layout.

This theme allows you to add various features to the header section, such as ads, breaking news updates, and a slider – all customizable based on your news categories.

The homepage layout is also highly customizable. You can choose to feature specific posts or news articles, highlighting the most important content on your website.

Rara Magazine empowers you to easily tailor your website to match your brand identity. This includes the ability to assign different colors to each category for a unique visual style. Additionally, the theme comes with a breadcrumb navigation feature to enhance user experience.

Rara Magazine lets you add widgets for emails, images, social media, and more without messing up the design.

Hueman ranks among the 30 most used themes on WordPress.org and for a good reason. It delivers exceptional performance and cutting-edge features. However, the extensive feature set might be overwhelming at first glance.

In essence, Hueman empowers you to customize every aspect of your website. You can tailor individual pages with unique styles, layouts, fonts, colors, and more. It also offers unlimited widget areas and ten unique post formats to enhance your website’s visual appeal.

A rare perk for a free theme, Hueman allows you to add two sidebars to any page. You can even customize their width and choose whether to display them on mobile devices, ensuring optimal user experience across all platforms.

Hueman prioritizes mobile-friendliness. Every element of your website, from header to footer to content and sidebars, can be customized for optimal viewing on mobile devices.

Finally, this free theme lets you display advertisements in the header or footer sections, providing an opportunity to generate revenue from your website.

Newsphere is a feature-rich theme designed for news, blogs, and magazine websites for various niches, including sports, fashion, and cryptocurrency. It comes with a variety of pre-starter templates and is possibly the only theme that comes with Arabic and China News starter templates.

This responsive theme lets you add different sections to your homepage. Showcase your best content with a prominent banner and a dedicated section for featured posts. Furthermore, you can add banner ads, popular tags, and exclusive post sections to keep visitors engaged.

Newsphere offers a wide range of customization options to personalize your website and make it your own. It also comes packed with features to get your media website up and running quickly. These features include the ability to add comments count, minutes read, and social sharing options.

In addition, Newsphere is compatible with Gutenberg and RTL. Plus, it integrates with WooCommerce, a powerful plugin that lets you add an online store to your news website.

Cream Magazine is a clean and modern theme with features and layouts specifically designed for news and magazine websites. With Cream Magazine, you will get two pre-designed demos that you can import with a single click.

When it comes to customization, you can choose between a full-width or a boxed layout, depending on your preference. 

Furthermore, the theme provides multiple homepage sections to showcase your content effectively. These include a News Ticker and three customizable news areas where you can add your news according to category.

The theme also provides two header layout variations, giving you some control over the look and feel of your website’s top section.

Moreover, the unique Lazy Load Image feature delays the loading of images until they are about to be scrolled into view, optimizing website performance.

Magbook is a free and easy-to-use WordPress theme for websites like news, magazines, reviews, and blogs. It’s lightweight and loads quickly.

Magbook comes with multiple pre-designed layouts that you can install with just one click—no coding required! You can also easily change the colors, fonts, and website layout using a built-in customizer.

This theme features Smart Sticky Navigation, which means the navigation bar remains visible as visitors scroll, providing them with easy access to key website sections. You can even place your CTAs in this section to encourage newsletter signups or guide readers to specific website segments.

Furthermore, you can customize your homepage by adding a category slider to showcase specific content categories, including a side menu for more navigation options.

If you want a website that’s effortless to manage and packed with advanced features, WP Magazine can help you out. The theme places a strong emphasis on highly readable content, making it an excellent companion for news, magazines, writers, and blog websites.

There are several layouts, sliders, headers, and footers where you can add your stories. The featured posts and category sections are particularly designed to help you highlight trending stories or breaking news.

With WP Magazine, you have color options for each section. You can change the color of buttons, headings, news titles, blog titles, headers, footer menus, and much more.

You can display news in various layouts based on the category. You can show your news on the homepage in grid layouts, list views, sliders, and carousels wherever you want.

The built-in drag-and-drop feature makes it super easy to build and customize your sections on the homepage. Likewise, you can even toggle which sections to show and which to hide.

The last one on our list is Editorial. Editorial is a magazine-style theme designed to give your news website a clean and professional look. It offers two layout options – boxed and wide – to cater to your preference and content style.

It comes packed with seven widgets designed to help you create a dynamic and engaging news homepage. These widgets allow you to display your most important stories, trending articles, and breaking news updates.

The theme has several customization options, including multiple color categories, sidebar layouts, and strategically placed ad spaces to generate revenue.

The theme also supports multiple menus, including a top bar menu, a primary menu for your main navigation, and a footer menu for additional links.

Astra is a popular free WordPress theme with over 2.4 million users. It’s highly rated, with over 6,000 five-star reviews and is the most popular theme after the Twenty Twenty series that comes with WordPress!

For a free version, Astra has a lot to offer its users. You have four options for page builders like Elementor, Beaver, Guterng Block or even AI Builder to build a website.  

Astra comes with over 240 Starter Templates, readymade templates you can install and use immediately. However, the free version doesn’t have a classic news-style starter template. So, you have to opt for a blogging template to start your news website.

Nevertheless, it’s fast, flexible and very easy to customize. You get complete control over color, typography, layout, header, footer and everything you see on the page.

In addition, it is also compatible with most WordPress plugins, can easily handle dynamic content, can be translated, and scores well on any speed test you care to use. 

ColorMag offers a well-organized layout that mimics the traditional look of a newspaper, complete with two layout options: boxed and wide. The boxed layout provides a classic newspaper feel, while the wide layout offers more breathing room for your content.

For those who want to add a touch of style to their site, ColorMag also supports a full-width slider. This is a great way to showcase your most important stories or images.

One important feature of a news website is customization. ColorMag makes it easy to customize the look and feel of your site with its multiple color options. You can choose a primary color for your site and different colors for different categories.

In addition to its customization options, ColorMag also supports a variety of popular page builders, including Gutenberg, Elementor, SiteOrigin, Beaver Builder, and Brizy.

Finally, ColorMag also includes a section for adding advertisements to your website. This is a great way to generate revenue from your website.

Newsup is a WordPress theme designed specifically for news websites. It lets you easily create a homepage filled with sliders and widgets to display your news in an engaging way.

You can choose between columns, tabs, lists, and double-list layouts to present your content in a way that best suits your audience and content type. This extends to individual pages as well, and you can customize the layout for archive blogs, single blog posts, and regular pages.

You also have control over your sidebar’s placement. You can choose to display it on the left or right or even opt for a full-width layout.

The theme offers a “Multi-Category Color” option so that you can assign specific colors to different categories on your website. This can enhance user experience by visually differentiating your content and making it easier for visitors to find the information they’re looking for.

SuperMag is another simple yet feature-rich WordPress theme that can be used to set up a professional news website. It offers powerful features such as customizable headers, footers, main pages, inner sections, and sidebars.

It is a widgetized theme, meaning you can customize your layout using widgets. These widgets offer advanced features like drag-and-drop functionality for arranging them, along with custom options for their design and content. 

In addition, this theme also equips you with features specifically designed for news websites, such as breaking news sections and breadcrumbs, as well as the ability to control featured images on different page types.

You can enable the search option to boost navigation and browsing experience. This theme is also ad-ready. You can place the header ad image in different positions, such as left, right, or middle.

In case of a mistake, you can reset all your theme settings to default. Alternatively, you can only reset the color options.

Viral stands out with its eye-catching layouts and user-friendly navigation, creating a smooth browsing experience for your visitors. This versatility makes Viral a perfect fit for a wide range of media websites, including news, magazines, blogs, and editorial platforms.

Viral offers a collection of 9 unique demo templates designed for different news niches. You can import and install these demos with a single click.

It offers both the WordPress Customizer and Elementor Page Builder, giving you the flexibility to personalize your website. You’ll have access to over 10 unique customizer blocks and over 20 drag-and-drop Elementor blocks to add functionalities and enhance your website’s content.

Furthermore, the theme provides a wide range of layouts, colors, and backgrounds for your pages. You can even add your own custom designs to personalize your website.

Additionally, this free WordPress News theme is fully compatible with the WooCommerce plugin.

If you’re looking to create a Pinterest-style news website for your lifestyle and fashion content, Blossom Pin is a great choice. The theme features a masonry layout to showcase your news in an engaging way.

It offers eight banner slider layouts and promo boxes in the Featured Section to highlight your most important news and stories. Further, you can even add engaging video content to your banners.

Blossom Pin has sufficient color options to decorate your website. You also get dedicated sections to add photos and social media profiles on the sidebar.

Finally, to help you earn decent revenue, this theme features Adsense-optimized spots and WooCommerce compatibility.