Magazine themes for WordPress are increasing in popularity because they give a blog an unique “non-blog” look. Change some settings in the control panel, widgets and theme’s CSS files, add a custom logo in the header and you will have a brand new one-of-a-kind website powered by WordPress. Once you’ve decided to use a magazine theme for your own site you will soon realize there are a hundreds of free magazine themes. This post picks out the top 10 free magazine themes for WordPress.

10. Mataram Theme


Mataram theme had the right idea of how to make a magazine theme, but the design failed to impress. It has good features such as easy video display option and several level deep commenting capability – but the text-heavy will fail to impress today’s image-hungry viewer. If it’s any consolation the home page will load fast.

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9. Technical Speech Theme


Technical Speech theme is exactly how the name sounds. It has a polarising sparse-image design and you will either love it or hate it. The dynamic sidebars and menu design is impressive – but the 404 error received when I went to the author’s page and theme page does not bode well for theme’s support for future WordPress versions.

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8. Sirup Theme


Sirup is a colorful magazine style theme if you like the blog header and post titles being highlighted. The CSS-only theme loads fast and options available would be useful to the most novice WordPress user. If you are just experimenting or learning about magazine themes Sirup would be a good choice.

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7. MyMag Theme


myMag theme has a smooth slideshow effect based on Javascript which is visible prominently on the home page. A very interesting feature is the news ticker located at the bottom of the page which scrolls through articles.

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6. Albizia Theme


Don’t let the difficult name throw you off – Albizia is a feature rich magazine style WordPress theme. The options can be configured from the theme control panel with little to no HTML or CSS knowledge.

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5. Vina Theme


Vina is a “standard” or rather “go-to” theme if you are looking for implementing magazine style on your blog. It has a classic look with its grid-based design and the shadow effect gives the auto-grabbed thumbnails a nice backdrop.

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4. Nature Theme


The Nature theme has several features which are generally only available for paid themes. Features such as out-of-the-box recent comments and posts along with a distinguished layout make this theme stand out.

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3. Magazine Basic


Don’t let “basic” in the name fool you. This theme packs a punch full of theme options, widgets and sidebars. But if you need an extra kick try out the Magazine Pro theme.

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2. Traction Theme


Traction succeeds in showing off content in a clean magazine theme which is packed with features. The carousel feature which cycles through featured posts is an excellent implementation of design and code and pushes this theme to the second spot on my list.

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1. Arras Theme


Arras theme snags the top spot on this list of magazine themes because of the variety it offers. If 10 blogs were all running the Arras theme they can be customized as 10 very unique looking sites.

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