Newspaper Theme Review: Should you Use it?

A WordPress magazine theme is a perfect option to help visitors explore all of your content if you post a lot of content on your WordPress site.

There is one name that stands out – Newspaper – when it comes to WordPress magazine themes.

Newspaper is one of the most common WordPress magazine themes of all time by tagDiv, with over 93000 sales at ThemeForest. “It’s actually one of the most popular WordPress themes, period, you don’t even need the magazine qualifier. 

Features of Newspaper Theme

Take a look at the quick list of all the features that you get with the Newspaper theme:

• Optimised performance: In my own performance tests, around 2.2 second load times for a complete demo site.
• 90+ importable demo sites: choose between uploading demo content or only settings for the demo theme.
• Visual, drag-and-drop interface. Using the bundled tagDiv Composer page builder for the frontend, customise prototype site templates and create your own designs.
• 1,000+ importable section templates-to import to the tagDiv composer, select from over 1,000 article and page templates.
• Header/footer builder – design your own custom headers or footers.
• You get dynamic content, support for Google AMP, as well as a bundled (and removable) mobile theme plugin. Mobile-friendly.
• Integrations-WooCommerce, Instagram, bbPress, BuddyPress and more are integrated with this theme.
• Easily insert AdSense or other banner ads on your site with integrated banner ad spots. You may also have, with the tagDiv Composer, your own ad placements.

Who Is the Newspaper Theme For?

For authors, news agencies, media publications or anyone else who publishes a lot of content, a WordPress magazine theme like Newspaper makes a perfect choice.

Magazine themes essentially help you view vast quantities of material, with additional choices for some content or categories to be included. For starters, you can see how you can use big images to feature your most important posts in the default demo site design. Then in the smaller, visitors can also sort out particular categories of posts.

In addition, note how visitors can see so many front page posts, which is not the case with a standard blog theme that only vertically “lists” the latest posts. Since magazine themes are designed for bloggers and publishers, built-in banner ad spots are often usually included, which is true for newspapers.

Essentially, if your attention is on having eyeballs on content that you publish daily, the theme of Newspaper WP is designed for you.

For authors, news agencies, media publications or anyone else who publishes a lot of content, a WordPress magazine theme like Newspaper makes a perfect choice.

Magazine themes essentially help you view vast quantities of material, with additional choices for some content or categories to be included. For starters, you can see how you can use big images to feature your most important posts in the default demo site design. Then in the smaller, visitors can also sort out particular categories of posts.

In addition, note how visitors can see so many front page posts, which is not the case with a standard blog theme that only vertically “lists” the latest posts. Since magazine themes are designed for bloggers and publishers, built-in banner ad spots are often usually included, which is true for newspapers.

Essentially, if your attention is on having eyeballs on content that you publish daily, the theme of Newspaper WP is designed for you.

Newspaper Theme Pricing

The theme of the newspaper is priced reasonably and costs just $59. The theme also comes with 6 months of support, which is useful enough for everyone on their WordPress platform to get support for setting up the theme.

The theme receives frequent updates, ensuring that the new theme codes on the website are used.

Exploring Newspaper Theme Demo Sites

Newspaper Theme comes with a lot of pre-built importable demo sites for popular blogging and news niches to help you quickly get your WordPress website up and running.

In general, you get access to every single demo site, so I can’t feature it. Around 30+ of those 90+ demo sites are “PRO” demo sites, better optimized for results.

Here we are going to highlight a couple of the prototypes, however to give you a sense of how the newspaper looks.

You have already seen the template of the “Classic” newspaper above. If you want to start a gossip blog, instead, you can use the Gossip template or if you have a video site, you can use the Video News template.

And for a cryptocurrency website, you could use the Crypto News template, which comes with its own cryptocurrency price ticker:

Overall, for a wide variety of niches and use cases, Newspaper offers importable demo sites, which makes it very flexible and highly customizable

In addition to the full site demonstrations, Newspaper also comes with its own library of cloud templates that allows you to select from 1,000+ templates for pages and blocks. Later on, you will see this in more depth.

Getting Started with Newspaper Theme: The Setup Guide

I have built it on my own test site to help you understand what it is like to work with the newspaper style, and I will show you how to set it up.

Installing the Required Plugins

Once you activate the theme, you’ll be prompted to install some companion plugins to access all of the features:

All you need to do is click a button – it’s quite simple.

You also get access to several other bundled plugins in addition to the plugins that it installs automatically, which can help you set up an email newsletter opt-in and enhance the mobile experience of your site with AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) support:

Importing a Demo Site

You’ll probably want to import one of the 90+ demo sites for the easiest way to get started with the newsletter.

You should go to the Install Demos tab to do so.:

You have two options when importing a demo site. You can—

Import the complete demo site, including all the content. Your site would essentially look just like the demo site (even including the demo blog posts).

Import the style of the demo site, but not any of the content. Your own content will need to be filled out but the basic design of your site will fit the demo site.

Once you click Install next to the demo site that you want to import, you’ll get a prompt to verify your choice:

And that’s it! Newspaper will handle everything else for you.

After importing the full demo site, you can see how my test site looks exactly like the demo site on the developer’s website:

How to Customize Newspaper Theme Settings

You get a detailed theme panel to further customize the theme.

The native real-time WordPress Customizer is not used by the newspaper, which is not ideal because it means you don’t get a real-time preview when you make adjustments. You get access to the Div Composer visual drag-and-drop tag, though, so this isn’t a major criticism. I will soon show this to you in more detail.

You get access to all sorts of different configuration choices in the theme panel:

This field also contains some valuable tools besides configuring how the theme looks.

It provides its own tool, for instance, to help you add tracking scripts or other JavaScript, such as the tracking script for Google Analytics.

If you import a demo site, it will add the required templates immediately. But to customize your platform, you can also make your own decisions and mix-and-match the many templates. You have the option of selecting a template from the Cloud Template Library for some of these settings, such as controlling your header and footer, so I think we should cover that next…

Using Cloud Models

The Cloud Templates library is a set of 1,000+ templates to build your website that you can mix and match.

These models are, essentially, for a particular part of a page/theme. For example, for your header, footer, search page, blog post design, etc., you will find templates.

You can scan templates by keyword or use plugins to find templates for particular uses (like your header) when you import a new template;

You will then be able to configure all the templates you are importing using the Composer tagDiv…

Content editing With tagDiv Composer

Finally, you get access to the tagDiv Composer, which is a visual drag-and-drop page creator, to further monitor your site design.

You can modify the cloud models that you have imported or create your own designs from start with this designer. On the left, you can get access to a range of building modules:

With drag-and-drop, you can add those modules to your template. In order to rearrange existing modules, you can also use drag-and-drop.

Then if you select on a specific module, the sidebar will modify its design and content.

For instance, you can choose to sort out specific posts by category, tag, author, and more if you edit the module that shows your recent posts:

Conclusion on the Newspaper Theme

Newspaper is one of the WordPress magazine’s best-selling themes of all time, but the figures speak for themselves.

Newspaper 10, the latest edition, is much more performance-friendly than previous versions, a major advantage. Again for a fully-built demo site, the median page load time in my tests was ~2.2 seconds, which is very good considering how many photos the demo site contains.

With over 90 demo pages, 1,000 import models, and visual drag-and-drag, you also get a lot of versatility.

Frequently Asked Questions