If you publish a lot of content on your WordPress website, then a WordPress magazine theme is a great choice to help your visitors discover all of your content.
When it comes to WordPress magazine themes, one name stands out – Newspaper.
With over 112,000 copies sold on ThemeForest , Newspaper is one of tagDiv’s most popular WordPress magazine themes of all time. In fact, it’s one of the most popular WordPress themes , and you don’t even need the “magazine” qualifier.
In this Newspaper theme review , I’ll personally take a look at this popular theme to help you decide if it’s right for your WordPress site.
I can:
- Introducing its main functions and templates
- Show you how the newspaper theme works on a live site
- Run some performance tests to see how fast your website loads using Newspaper
Newspaper theme main functions
I’ll go into more detail about some of the most important features later, but let’s first quickly list all the features that the Newspaper theme has:
- Optimized performance – In my own performance testing, the full demo site loaded in about 2.2 seconds.
- 120+ Importable Demo Sites - Choose to import demo content or just demo theme settings.
- Visual, Drag-and-Drop Design – Customize the demo site template and build your own design for the front-end using the bundled tagDiv Composer page builder.
- 1,500+ Importable Section Templates – Choose from over 1,500 post and page templates to import into the tagDiv editor.
- Header/Footer Builder – Design your own custom header or footer in the Site Manager.
- Mobile-friendly – You get responsive design, Google AMP support, and a bundled (optional) mobile theme plugin.
- Integrations – Newspaper integrates with WooCommerce, Instagram, bbPress, BuddyPress, and more.
- Built-in Banner Ad Placements – Easily insert AdSense or other banner ads on your site. You can also include your own ad placements using tagDiv Composer.
- tagDiv Shop – Plugin to extend the functionality of your WooCommerce website.
- Pre-built store websites – complete website designs ready to install
- tagDiv Opt-In Builder – A plugin that helps you generate new leads, gain subscribers, and display content only to subscribed users.
Who is the newspaper theme suitable for?
A WordPress magazine theme like Newspaper is a great choice for bloggers, news agencies, media publications , online sellers, or anyone else who publishes a lot of content.
Basically, magazine themes help you showcase a large amount of content with additional options to showcase certain content or categories.
For example, in the default demo site design, you can see how a large image is used to showcase the most important posts. Visitors can then also filter out posts from a specific category in the smaller sections below:
Also, notice how visitors are able to see so many posts from the front page, which is not the case with normal blog themes, which just “list” the latest posts vertically.
Since magazine themes are built for bloggers and publishers , they often also include built-in banner ad spots, and the same is true for newspapers.
Basically, if your focus is on attracting people to the content you publish regularly, then the Newspaper WP theme is made for you.
On the other hand, if you want to build more of a static website, such as a business brochure site or a portfolio, then Newspaper might not be for you.
Newspaper Theme Pricing
The Newspaper theme is reasonably priced at just $59. The theme also comes with 6 months of support, which is more than enough for anyone setting up the theme on a WordPress site.
The theme is constantly updated, ensuring you are using the latest theme code on your website.
continue…
Explore Newspaper Theme Demo Site
To help you get your WordPress site up and running quickly, the Newspaper theme comes with a ton of pre-built, importable demo sites for popular blogging and news niches.
In total, you have access to over 120 importable demo sites , so I can't describe every single one of them. Of these 120+ demo sites, about 30+ are "PRO" demo sites, which are better optimized for performance . In addition, there are pre-built store sites (full demos) that you can edit.
However, I will pick out a few designs to give you a feel for what the newspaper might look like.
You’ve seen the “classic” newspaper design above.
If you want to create a gossip blog, then you can use the gossip template:
If you have a video website, you can use the Video News template:
For a cryptocurrency website, you can use the Crypto News template, which comes with its own cryptocurrency price tickers:
Overall, Newspaper provides importable demo sites for a wide range of domains and use cases, which makes it very flexible and highly customizable.
In addition to the complete website demos, Newspaper also comes with its own cloud template library that lets you choose from over 1,500 page and block templates. You’ll learn more about this later.
Getting Started with the Newspaper Theme: Setup Guide
To help you get an idea of what it’s like to use the Newspaper theme, I’ve installed it on my own test site and show you how to set it up.
Install the required plugins
Once you activate the theme, you will be prompted to install some companion plugins to access all the features:
All you need to do is click a button – it’s that easy.
In addition to the automatically installed plugins, you’ll also get access to some additional bundled plugins that can help you set up email newsletter opt-ins and improve your site’s mobile experience with AMP support (Accelerated Mobile Pages):
Additionally, the Newspaper theme has been improved with the ability to create mobile pages.
Importing the Demo Site
To get started with Newsletter in the quickest way, you may want to import one of the 120+ demo sites.
To do this, you can go to the "Install Demo" tab:
When importing a demo site, you have two options. You can either…
- Import the complete demo site with all content included. Basically, your site will be exactly like the demo site (even down to the demo blog posts).
- Imports the demo site style, but does not import any content . You will need to fill it in with your own content, but the basic design of the site will match the demo site.
For the purposes of this review, I will also choose to import the demo content.
After clicking "Install" next to the demo site you want to import, you will receive a prompt to verify your selection:
That's it! The newspaper will take care of everything else for you.
After importing the completed demo site, you can see that my test site looks exactly like the demo site on the developer website:
How to customize newspaper theme settings
To further customize the theme, you get a detailed theme panel where you can preview most of the global settings.
Newspaper doesn’t use the native live WordPress Customizer, which isn’t ideal because it means you don’t get a live preview as you make changes. You do have access to the visual drag-and-drop tagDiv Composer , though, so that’s not a big deal. I’ll show you more about that shortly.
This area also includes some useful tools.
For example, it includes its own tools to help you add tracking scripts or other JavaScript, such as the Google Analytics tracking script.
For some of these settings, like controlling headers and footers, you have the option of selecting a template from the cloud template gallery, so I thought we should cover that next...
Using cloud templates
The Cloud Template Library is a collection of over 1,500 templates that you can mix and match to design your website.
Basically, these templates are for a specific part of your page/theme. For example, you can find templates for headers, footers, search pages, blog post designs, etc.
If you import a demo site, it will automatically add the necessary templates, but you can also choose and mix and match templates to customize your site.
When you want to change the template for a specific page or post, you have to import a new template right on the front-end from the Cloud Library tab above the site.
You will then be able to customize your new page or post template using tagDiv Composer.
Editing content using tagDiv Composer
Finally, to gain further control over your site’s design, you have access to tagDiv Composer , a visual drag-and-drop page builder .
Using this builder, you can customize imported cloud templates or build your own designs from scratch.
You'll have access to a series of building blocks on the left:
You can add these modules to your design using the drag and drop feature. You can also rearrange existing modules using the drag and drop feature.
Then, if you click on a specific module, you will be able to customize its design and content in the sidebar.
For example, if you edit a module that displays recent posts, you can choose to filter out specific posts by category, tag, author, etc.:
Newspaper Theme Site Manager
When you open tagDiv Composer, you'll see three buttons: Add Element, Load Template (from Cloud Library), or Site Manager. In Site Manager, you can easily access header and footer customizable templates and assign them individually on pages or globally on the site. In addition, you can configure fonts for header, content, and footer sections.
Newspaper WooCommerce Features
Starting with Newspaper 11 version, the tagDiv team added a new custom plugin called tagDiv Shop and several pre-built website demos with beautiful product and category pages.
The plugin also provides dedicated functionality of tagDiv Composer in the form of Woo elements.
Newspaper theme performance test
To see how Newspaper performs in real life, I imported the full Classic Newspaper demo into my test site. I also set up basic page caching, which I consider a must-have feature for every WordPress site.
I then used WebPageTest to run nine separate performance tests and took the median value:
In these performance results, you can see that the average load time for nine separate tests was 2.229 seconds , which is well within the 2-3 second range that most people recommend. Additionally, it made **46 HTTP requests for the entire demo site, which was only **1.465 MB in size .
For the number of images on the demo site’s homepage, these results are pretty impressive.
Overall, while you can find faster WordPress themes (like GeneratePress ), Newspaper is still solid from a performance perspective and can build you a complete website that loads in under three seconds.
Buy Newspaper Theme – Instant Access ($59)
Newspaper Support and Help Documentation
To help you use the theme, Newspaper comes with detailed written documentation . You can also find some video tutorials on the developer's YouTube channel.
If you need additional support, you can use the private support forum .
Final Thoughts on the Newspaper Theme
Newspaper is one of the best-selling WordPress magazine themes of all time, so the numbers speak for themselves.
The latest version, Newspaper 1 1.2, performs better than previous versions, which is a big plus. Likewise, in my testing, the median page load time for a fully built demo site was about 2.2 seconds, which is pretty good considering the number of images the demo site contains.
You also get a lot of flexibility, with over 120 demo sites, 1,500 importable templates, and the visual, drag-and-drop tagDiv Composer.
All in all, if you publish a lot of content and are looking for a WordPress magazine theme, then you should definitely consider Newspaper as your website theme.
If you are an existing Newspaper theme user, I would love to hear your opinions and reviews about the theme and support. If you have exciting tips and ideas you would like to share with our readers, please feel free to share them in the comments section below.
Disclosure: Some of the links in this article contain affiliate links, which means we may earn a commission if you click through to visit us, at no extra cost to you. See how SidelinePlay is funded, why it’s important, and how you can support us.
Was this helpful?