27 Best WordPress Magazine Themes of 2020 [FREE + PAID]

Are you looking for the best WordPress magazine themes for your website?

Content-rich websites need different layouts that can help them promote all new and important content at once. WordPress magazine themes are designed to do just that.

In this article, we’ll share some of the best WordPress magazine themes that will help your content shine.

Getting Started with a WordPress Magazine Website

WordPress is the best website builder for building a magazine site. It currently powers over 34% of all websites on the internet.

If you want to make a magazine website with WordPress, then the first thing you’ll need is a domain name and web hosting.

Magazine websites often have a lot of content including images and videos. This is why you need to choose a WordPress hosting company that offers you enough space to upload all your files while also handling your traffic efficiently.

If you are just starting out, then we recommend Bluehost. They are the most popular hosting company and an official WordPress.org recommended hosting provider.

For complete step by step instructions, see our guide on how to start a WordPress blog.

If you have high traffic, then we would recommend going with WP Engine. It is a managed WordPress hosting service, which means they will handle everything for you.

Some of you may already have a WordPress site, and you may just want to switch to a magazine theme. It’s important that you understand what happens when you switch your WordPress theme and follow our checklist of things you must do before changing WordPress themes.

With that said, let’s take a look at some of the best WordPress magazine themes that you can use on your site.

1. Divi

Divi is a popular WordPress theme designed to create any website. It comes with a built-in page builder and dozens of ready-made layouts, including multiple templates for online magazines.

It features custom design elements, color schemes, background options, and more. It also includes SEO optimization to help rank your website in search engines.

2. Astra

Astra is one of the best WordPress multi-purpose themes on the market. It comes with several ready-to-launch websites that you can install using their free Astra Starter Sites plugin.

It works great with any WordPress page builder plugin and comes with tons of flexible options. You can customize your theme using live customizer or by simply editing a page in default WordPress editor.

3. Magazine Pro

Magazine Pro is a modern WordPress magazine theme by StudioPress. Built on top of the powerful Genesis framework, it features customizable headers and comes ready for WooCommerce.

It also includes an easy to setup widgetized homepage, multiple page layouts, and live theme customizer.

StudioPress is now part of WP Engine, the most popular managed WordPress hosting company. You can get this theme and all 35+ other StudioPress themes when you sign up for WP Engine hosting to build your website.

Bonus: WPBeginner users also get an additional 20% OFF. Get started with WP Engine today!

4. OceanWP

OceanWP is a free WordPress multi-purpose theme. It ships with dozens of pre-built sites and a 1-click content importer to get started quickly.

With eCommerce integration, it allows you to sell merchandise and make money online. The theme is translation ready and supports RTL languages out of the box.

5. Ultra

Ultra is a stunning WordPress theme with a multi-purpose approach to easily make a magazine or news website. It offers fully customizable demo sites and a built-in page builder for customization.

Other notable features include premium addons, color schemes, layout options, parallax scrolling, and more. It has image filters to impress your users in the first look at your magazine website.

6. Guten Theme

Guten Theme is a stylish WordPress magazine theme designed for the WordPress block editor. It comes with multiple built-in layouts for header, footer, and blog.

It supports additional Gutenberg blocks, which allow you to create impressive content layouts for your posts and pages easily. It has custom colors and font settings with flexible templates.

7. Tribune

Tribune is a powerful WordPress news and magazine theme with an elegant layout featuring your most important content. It has a featured posts area at the top and a carousel slider at the bottom of the page.

Among other features, it offers a slider, a video widget, WordPress live customizer settings, tabbed widgets, infinite scroll, social media integration, and quick setup.

8. Hestia Pro

Hestia Pro is an excellent WordPress multi-purpose theme for news and magazine websites. It comes with a fully customizable homepage with a featured content slider, a dynamic homepage builder, featured categories, and a 1-click demo content installer.

It has multiple page templates, custom colors, fonts, logo, and background options. The theme also comes with several custom widgets and multiple widget-ready areas.

9. The Wonderwall

Wonderwall is a beautifully designed WordPress magazine theme. It includes 9 pre-made homepage layouts that allow you to choose from a bevy of grids, featured posts, single lists, and more.

Inside, you’ll also find custom widgets for social media profiles, Instagram, and content discovery features. It also offers dedicated positions to display banner ads across your website.

10. Felt

Felt is an elegant WordPress magazine theme with a ton of awesome features. It is designed to beautifully display content in a magazine layout.

It pays special attention to readability across devices and looks equally great on mobile and desktop. It has a fullscreen featured content slider to showcase your content categories beautifully.

11. HitMag

HitMag is a free WordPress news and magazine theme. It comes with a featured content slider on top with a right sidebar and dual navigation menu.

It has a featured categories section, an ad placement area, a trending widget, and more. The theme set up is quite easy with 1-click demo content importer, which you can then replace with your own content.

12. The Essence

The Essence is an elegant WordPress magazine theme suitable for lifestyle, fashion, entertainment, and similar websites. It includes 4 different layout choices for your article pages, and a built-in social sharing feature with a floating sidebar to easily share articles from your website.

Inside you will also find custom widgets for Instagram and social profiles. It comes with a pain-free setup process allowing you to easily get started using the live customizer.

13. News Pro

News Pro is designed for WordPress news and magazine websites. Created on top of Genesis framework, News Pro comes with a solid foundation to build content-rich websites.

It comes with two sidebars, a footer widget area, a customizable header, simple navigation menus, and beautiful typography.

14. Hueman

Hueman is a classic WordPress magazine theme designed to showcase your content with elegance. It comes with a featured content slider, dual navigation, left and right sidebars, a featured categories area, and multiple ad spaces.

Other notable features include a custom logo, social media icons, page layouts, and several widget-ready areas. You can use the WordPress live customizer to easily make changes on your website.

15. Public Opinion

Public Opinion is a sleek and modern WordPress magazine theme. It comes in a light color scheme and a flexible homepage layout that you can easily customize using widgets.

It has content sliders, featured categories, advertising space, multiple category layouts, and more. It is optimized for speed and performance and looks equally great on mobile devices.

16. NewsCard

NewsCard is a stylish WordPress magazine theme suitable for technology, gaming, fashion, travel, health, and other niches. It comes with bold colors that make your content more readable.

The theme has a top story ticker to showcase trending stories on the top. It also allows you to organize your content categorically and create a more engaging layout.

17. OriginMag

OriginMag is a magazine WordPress theme with eCommerce support. It is fully compatible with WooCommerce and perfect for news and magazine sites that sell merchandise.

It takes a minimalist approach to design and focuses more on the content readability. The homepage is dynamically built with featured content, featured categories, and your latest articles.

18. Metro Magazine

Metro Magazine is a free WordPress theme designed for online news and magazine websites. It has multiple color schemes, color labels for categories, custom widgets, social media integration, and multiple page template.

The theme has two navigation menus, widget areas, ad placement, and live customizer support. It offers a very modern user interface with a focus on images and typography.

19. Patch

Patch is a masonry-style WordPress blogging and magazine theme featuring a minimalist layout that makes your content pop out. It comes with multiple layout choices, including a grid layout for your homepage.

It is easy to use and quick to set up, with lots of flexible options to customize every aspect of your website.

20. ColorMag

ColorMag is a sophisticated WordPress magazine theme. It comes with a featured content slider, custom widgets, and a custom header support.

With color choices and custom backgrounds, you can fully change the look and feel of your magazine website. It also supports WooCommerce out of the box.

Related: BigCommerce vs WooCommerce – Which one is better?

21. Domino Magazine

Domino Magazine is a highly customizable WordPress magazine theme. The homepage features multiple widgetized areas and a dynamic page builder.

It comes with a built-in news ticker, weather widget, and a tabbed widget. The theme also allows you to easily add a custom background, headers, sliders, and your logo.

22. Responz

Responz is a three-column news and magazine theme for WordPress. It features an elegant design with great typography and a fully responsive layout.

It comes with multiple layout options like 2 sidebars, 1 sidebar, or full-width homepage. You can also choose from the list view or grid view post layouts.

23. Metro Pro

Metro Pro is a powerful WordPress magazine theme built on top of the Genesis framework. It features a custom background with large featured images.

It comes with an easy-to-setup homepage with sections for your featured stories. It also includes built-in social media integration, custom menus, custom widgets, and a theme options panel.

24. MH Magazine

MH Magazine is a modish WordPress theme built specifically for news, magazines, personal blogs, and editorial websites. It offers separate sections for trending topics and popular posts.

Among other features, it comes with eye-catching ad space and a custom post slider. It also features a fullscreen custom background image that you can replace to add your own image using WordPress customizer settings.

25. News Portal

News Portal is a beautifully designed WordPress magazine and news theme. It comes with multiple color schemes and options to choose colors for your category pages.

For easier customization, it includes dozens of theme options all accessible through live customizer. It is tested with all popular WordPress plugins and optimized for better speed, performance, and SEO.

26. Royal Magazine

Royal Magazine is a beautiful free WordPress magazine theme suitable for newspapers, magazines, and personal blogs. It comes with a magazine-style homepage layout, which is easy to set up using the live theme customizer.

This responsive theme comes with multiple navigation menus, sidebars, color options, and page templates. It also works great with popular page builders and top WordPress plugins.

27. Magazine

Magazine is a powerful WordPress theme with tons of amazing features. It comes with 42 layout choices, a layout builder, a featured content slider, sliding menus, a mega menu on top, social sharing, related posts, and many more features.

It also features six color schemes, multiple sidebars, custom widgets, icon fonts, and tons of shortcodes.

We hope this article helped you find the best WordPress magazine themes for your website. You may also want to see our guide on the best WordPress newspaper themes.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post 27 Best WordPress Magazine Themes of 2020 [FREE + PAID] appeared first on WPBeginner.

January 24, 2020 at 06:20PM

How to Make a Great Volunteer Application Form in WordPress

Do you want to add a volunteer application form to your organization’s WordPress website?

If you’re one of the people managing applications, you might currently be spending a lot of time going back and forth by business email or even handling paper forms.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could collect volunteer applications online and manage them directly from your website?

In this article, we’ll show you how to easily create a volunteer application form in WordPress, even if you’ve never created a form before.

Creating Your Volunteer Application Form in WordPress

First, you need to install and activate the WPForms plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

WPForms is the best WordPress form builder plugin on the market. It is beginner-friendly, and there’s also a WPForms Lite version that’s free, making it a handy option for nonprofits on a small budget. Yes, we know that website costs can add up.

Upon activating the plugin, you need to visit WPForms » Settings page in your WordPress dashboard to enter your license key. You can find this information under your account on WPForms website.

Next, you need to visit the WPForms » Addons page to install the Template Pack Addon, so you can get the built-in volunteer form template.

Click the Install Addon button for the Form Templates Pack Addon. Its Status should then show as Active.

Once you’ve done that, go to WPForms » Add New to create your new form.

Next, you need to give your form a name, then scroll down to the Additional Templates section. Simply search for “Volunteer” here or scroll down, and you should see the Volunteer Recruitment Form template.

Click on it, and WPForms will create a volunteer application form for you.

Next, you’ll need to customize the form so that it’s fully relevant for your group or organization. You can edit any of the questions and answers by simply clicking on the form field that you want to change.

You can also add extra questions or options to your form by clicking the Add Fields tab at the top.

If there are particular fields that are necessary such as the email address field, then you can simply check the box next to Required, and it will become a mandatory field. This means that users will not be able to submit the form without filling this field.

You and your volunteers can easily see which fields are required because they’ll have a small red asterisk next to the field label.

Once you’re happy with your volunteer application form, you can finish setting it up by going to Settings » General.

You might want to change the Submit Button Text here. You could change this from Submit to Send Application, Apply Now, Volunteer now, or anything else that’s appropriate for your organization.

You can also make other changes if you wish. Unless you’re going to use a different form of spam prevention instead, we recommend keeping the anti-spam honeypot feature enabled. This prevents fake spam applications which will save you time. We also recommend setting up reCAPTCHA to further reduce spam submissions.

Setting Up Notifications and Confirmations

By default, whenever someone submits a form on your site, you’ll get an email containing the information they’ve sent.

With WPForms, you can also take a look at submitted form entries in your WordPress dashboard.

You can also set things up so that the volunteer who’s completed the form also gets an email to let them know that you’ve received their application.

Of course, whether or not you’re sending the volunteer a confirmation email, you’ll want to make sure they see an on-screen confirmation when they submit the form.

This happens automatically with WPForms, but you can also customize the message to make it more relevant to your group or organization.

You can edit the confirmation message under Settings » Confirmation.

Bonus Tip: You can also use WPForms’ marketing integration to automatically add all volunteer applicants to your email newsletter. WPForms integrates will all the best email marketing services.

Adding Your Volunteer Application Form to Your Site

Finally, you’ll need to put your form onto your website, so that people can actually fill it in. Using WPForms, you can put it on a page or in a post. You could even include it in your sidebar.

Most likely, you’ll want to put it on a page on your site. Simply create a new page or find the existing page you want to use and click the Add Form button.

If you’re using the Gutenberg (block) editor, then you need to click the (+) icon to create a new block, and then select WPForms. You can find it under Widgets, or you can search for it.

If you’re still using the classic WordPress editor, then click the Add Form button next to Add Media.

Next, you’ll see the WPForms dropdown. Select your form and click Add Form.

Finally, publish your post and test out the form to make sure that it’s working. You should see your confirmation message after filling it out, and you should receive an email notification whenever it’s filled in.

If you don’t get an email, then there could be an issue with WordPress emails. Check out our guide on how to fix WordPress not sending email issue with step by step instructions.

Once you’re happy with everything, you can share the link to your page with your email list, and social media accounts. Hopefully, you’ll get lots of new volunteers eager to offer their time and share their skills.

We hope this article helped you learn how to make a great volunteer application form in WordPress. You may also want to take a look at our favorite WordPress themes for nonprofits and our recommended WordPress plugins for nonprofits.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Make a Great Volunteer Application Form in WordPress appeared first on WPBeginner.

January 23, 2020 at 07:02PM

8 Best Keyword Research Tools for SEO in 2020 (Compared)

Are you looking for the best keyword research tools for SEO?

Keyword research is vital for growing traffic to your site. It helps you write the perfect content to increase your organic search traffic.

The challenge is that finding the right keyword research tool can be tricky, especially if you’re fairly new to SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

In this article, we’ll share the very best keyword research tools that experts use to grow their website traffic.

What is a Keyword Research Tool?

A keyword research tool helps you find topic ideas that people are searching for on search engines like Google.

This helps you find content ideas that your customers are looking for. You can then plan your content strategy to cover those topics in your blog posts and landing pages.

Keyword research tools also help you unlock the keywords where your competitors are ranking on the top. You can then improve your content to target those keywords and steal their traffic.

That being said, let’s take a look at the best keyword research tools for SEO that you can use.

1. SEMrush

SEMrush is a complete SEO suite with all the tools you need to carry out keyword research.

Using the Keyword Overview tool, you can type in a keyword and get a full picture of everything you need to know. This includes how many people search for the keyword, whether it’s growing in popularity or becoming less popular (the Trend), and much more.

After scrolling down, you can also see a handy list of other similar keywords you might want to use, along with a list of organic search results, so you can find out where your competitors rank for the keyword. You can also check out Google Ads that use that keyword.

2. AnswerThePublic

AnswerThePublic works a bit differently from most other keyword research tools, presenting results in a nice visual format (though you can also see them in a list and download a .csv file of results).

If you’re just getting started with SEO and keyword research, then this is a great tool to try, because you don’t even need to create an account to use it. Just type in your keyword and take a look at what comes up.

The keyword results from AnswerThePublic are based on Google and Bing’s auto-suggest features. You can click on any of these keywords to search for it in Google, and it’ll open up in a new tab.

This will show what content is ranking for those terms and whether there’s a featured snippet on it.

3. Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is a free tool from Neil Patel that offers search volume data, keyword suggestions, an idea of how difficult your keyword will be to rank for, and more.

As well as seeing lots of suggestions for related keywords, you can view a table of the top 100 Google results for that keyword, with estimated visits, number of backlinks, a domain score, and a total number of social shares.

Under Content Ideas, it also shows content related to your keyword, listing estimated monthly visits, backlinks, and number of shares on Facebook and Pinterest.

If you sign into Ubersuggest with your Google account, then you’ll be able to get more keyword suggestions, daily rank tracking, and personalized SEO suggestions.

4. Ahrefs

Ahrefs offers similar features to SEMrush, and makes a great alternative to it. Using Ahrefs, you can come up with keyword ideas simply by typing a keyword into the search box. You’ll then see a whole list of keyword suggestions.

You can also use Ahrefs to see content your competitors are ranking for (but that you’re not), so you can create new pieces targeting keywords related to those subjects.

Both SEMrush and Ahrefs offer a bunch of other useful tools too, like reports that find broken links on your site.

5. Google Keyword Planner

Google’s Keyword Planner is really designed for use by advertisers who want to run their ads on Google. However it’s still a useful tool for SEO, and it’s free to use.

To access it, you’ll need a Google Ads account. If you don’t already have one, then you’ll need to create one and enter your payment details, but you don’t need to run an active campaign or pay for anything.

Once you’ve got access to the Keyword Planner through your Google Ads account, you can type in any keyword and view data for (very approximately) how many monthly searches it has. You’ll also see a long list of related keywords ideas, which you scroll through or download.

6. Long Tail Pro

Like most premium keyword tools, Long Tail Pro shows an overview of data about your keyword, with a particular focus on how you rank against your competitors.

You can use it to take a look at the top results in search engines for your keyword, so you can figure out where you rank against your competition.

You can also enter specific keywords that you want to track, so you can see how your content is ranking for those keywords changes over time.

7. Serpstat

Serpstat is another excellent keyword research tool.

With Serpstat, you can easily view the top Google results for your keyword. These results include the site that appears in the featured snippet (if any) as the first result, which is why the post from IsItWP is featured in both first and second place in the screenshot below.

You can also view lots of details about your competitors for that keyword, with an indication of how visible they are (the higher the number here, the more visitors they likely receive).

8. SpyFu

SpyFu is designed to let you learn from your competitors by digging into their most profitable keywords (and their ads too).

You can try it out for free, without even logging in. Just type the URL of the site you want to check into the search bar and you’ll see the results straight away. If you want to take a look at more than one site, then you’ll need to create a free account and log in.

SpyFu collects past data, so you can see how your own site or your competitor’s site has fallen or risen in the rankings for particular keywords. You can also compare your site against other sites in your industry. Here’s a look at Moz’s website versus some other sites on similar topics.

We hope this article helped you find the best keyword research tools for SEO. You may also want to check out our guide on doing keyword research for tips on how best to carry out your research and put the results into practice.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post 8 Best Keyword Research Tools for SEO in 2020 (Compared) appeared first on WPBeginner.

January 22, 2020 at 08:26PM