Back to: How to Increase News Website Traffic
Once we are done finding our niche and building a website, the next important thing is to find a good, sorry, best theme so that the first impression of any user may be good. Layout is of the primary things which affects user’s engagement. First visit to NYTimes.com/Entrepreneur/com/Time.com would make the user believe that these are professional sites.
On the other hand, a news website bombarded with ads, lots of unprofessional images and useless content, will make a bad impression on the users. I have a list of such sites but revealing them here would be a bad idea.
So, how do we make our website professional and minimal and also make ads add beauty to the content? Here comes the need of a good News Theme for website. And when we say “good and professional theme”, we must know that there are just a few free and paid themes which, I think, would make a site look professional and here I am going to list 5 themes which I like the most.
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OceanWP
OceanWP is one of my favorite themes because of its features, and design. I use OceanWP on all of my sites (except community ones). You can use OceanWP with any page builder. You can literally change everything about this theme. Though we can’t get fixed header option, you can easily fix the header by using following CSS code
#site-header {
position: fixed;
}We can use plugins like RankMath, Infinite Scroll, Related News, Headlines and Ad Inserter Plugins etc.
Hello by Elementor
Hello is a great theme by Elementor. I am not a big fan of Elementor, yet I find it awesome. What I liked about this theme is its flexibility. Unlike other themes, we get a blank page that we can literally design as we want. If you have a great design in your mind, go for this theme and bring your news website to this world.
But do remember that most of the features are premium. So, you will require to buy Elementor Pro for accessing better blocks for your news website.
Swift for AMP Sites
Swift is an awesome theme if you are planning to launch an AMP website. This theme comes with AMP for WP Plugin. You can make the whole site serve on AMP. This way, your site will be super fast and get an edge over the normal sites. The only downside of AMP is that you cannot run many 3rd party JS (ads, scripts, etc) on your site. Only AdSense, Ezoic, and a few ads can run on it.
Newspack
This is an open-source theme bundle (along with 10+ plugins) which you can use for your news website. Its layout is one of its kind and can be considered as the best theme for news as its an initiative of WordPress and Google News (dad of internet itself). Though it is paid (if you plan to host your site on their hosting, it is free and open source for self-hosted sites. Simply go to GitHub and download its zip and install on your site.
But, I would recommend you to delete all the existing plugins and themes, so that it may not cause any conflicts.
Newspaper Theme
Our list would be incomplete without mentioning this theme. Many big sites like ThePrint use this theme. It is primarily made for news and entertainment websites. So, if you do not like any of the above themes, you should invest your money for this theme. It comes with many inbuilt features which are enough for a fully functional website.
ZoxPress
I cam across this theme recently and found it amazing. It comes with a very minimalistic and interactive layout. I found its design better than OceanWP and even Newspaper. It is paid. You can check it on themeforest and if you are planning to invest some amount, you can definitely for this theme of Newspaper.
So, these were the themes which I found good for an ideal news website. You can use any other if you don’t find any of these as per your expectations. But keep in mind that our design should be minimalistic, modern and compelling. Without a good design, we will fail at the very first step.
