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“These themes are hand-picked for their outstanding design quality, features, and customer reviews.”
Love memes and GIFs?
If you want to launch your own viral content website, you can’t beat the themes here.
These themes are designed especially for viral news and media websites. Publish your own content and let the community vote. Even better, foster an active and engaged community by allowing them to publish their own posts and videos on your site.
All of this and more is available with the awesome viral media WordPress themes below.
You may also enjoy our list of content sharing themes or our guide about making your own website like Buzzfeed.
As the new owner of a viral content website, you might like my latest plugin, Strive Content Calendar. Use it to plan and publish shareworthy content.
Viral WordPress themes
The themes in this collection are responsive, so they look incredible on smartphones and laptops alike. They’ve also been updated recently, which means they are compatible with the latest WordPress version.
Here are my top picks for best viral WordPress themes for 2024.
1. Maggz by Select Themes (Themeforest)
Theme Description
Maggz has an ultra-modern and vibrant style. Everything you publish with this theme will look current thanks to this aesthetic which is important for a viral website!
The design of this theme suits news and viral magazine sites best. It would work well if you want to create a website like 9gag. There are better themes here to build a community website and allow user-submitted content, but Maggz is excellent for a website where you’ll publish all the content. There is very little distraction in the design and tons of space to promote your posts. Maggz will be a great choice if you frequently publish (1+ posts/day) thanks to this design.
When it comes to customizations, Maggz doesn’t disappoint. It has plenty of built-in layouts for the post archives and homepage. In addition, the Visual Composer plugin comes bundled with this viral theme which lets you create completely custom page templates. It also comes with the Slider Revolution plugin for creating responsive image sliders with beautiful animations. Add in custom color schemes and other basic customization tools like custom fonts, and this is one highly flexible viral content theme.
2. Bimber by Bring The Pixel (Themeforest)
Theme Description
When it comes to WordPress themes for viral media and social sharing, it’s hard to beat Bimber. This theme has been designed from the ground up to be just like Buzzfeed. And on top of that, the developers have been consistently investing in this theme for years, and it now includes an incredible amount of functionality.
‘If you browse around the Bimber demo, you’ll find a few different post types. There are regular posts, but there are also polls. This includes special types of polls like Hot or Not and Versus, to name a couple. The layouts are great for featuring both eye-catching images and clickbaity titles. You can also promote lists of the hottest and trending content on your site.
Regarding the functionality in this theme, it’s hard to even scratch the surface. There are SO MANY features in Bimber. There are user ranks complete with a point system, BuddyPress integration to enable social network features like on-site live messaging, auto-play videos, image editing tools, and an ad manager.
When it comes to general site customization features, Bimber includes the Visual Composer drag-and-drop page builder plugin for template creation and a separate drag-and-drop interface for creating custom header layouts. But don’t be intimidated by all these features! Bimber is easy to get started with because it comes with a one-click demo content importer that allows you to recreate any of the demo sites immediately. You’ll be amazed by the variety of demos, especially the one that lets you create a site like Reddit.
Click the link below to see the rest of the features and demo sites you can recreate.
3. BuddyBoss Theme by BuddyBoss
Theme Description
This theme’s a bit different.
Instead of creating a publication where you publish content in the hopes of it going viral, you can use the BuddyBoss theme to make a community site instead. With BuddyBoss, you can make a site where viral content flourishes and users publish their own memes and comments.
The BuddyBoss developers have created their own social community plugin based on the popular BuddyPress plugin. The difference is that they keep it more actively maintained, and it now includes way more features.
If you’re interested in creating a social network site, then BuddyBoss should be your top choice.
4. Weltgeist by Edge Themes (Themeforest)
Theme Description
This viral magazine theme is perfect for publishing editorials or creating a news website with a modern twist. It has a dark design that sets it apart from many other templates listed here and includes funky animations that make the stories pop off the page.
What you’ll like most about Weltgeist is the variety of post layouts. You can list posts from categories or tags easily on the homepage and customize the different designs for the post pages themselves. This flexibility comes from the easy-to-use Elementor page builder plugin, which is seamlessly integrated with Weltgeist.
It doesn’t hurt that Weltgeist also integrates with WooCommerce, in case you want to tack on a merch shop or add an affiliate store. All around, it’s an extremely stylish and feature-rich WordPress theme for a viral content website.
5. Saxon by Dedalx (Themeforest)
Theme Description
The Saxon theme has an awesome aesthetic with rounded sans-serif fonts, bright gradients, and brilliant use of flat design principles.
The screenshot above shows off the freebie demo. Freebie sites are perfect for garnering large social media followings and quickly becoming high-traffic destinations. You’ll love the email subscription widget and the built-in social share buttons.
Saxon is extremely flexible, so don’t take the screenshot above as the only example. There are layouts that better serve viral magazine and video gallery sites too. Each one shares the same overall design style and provides an exceptional user experience.
Select from any of the 11 blog listing layouts, quickly update the individual post layouts, and utilize 26 distinct blocks to create a custom homepage. You’re sure to be pleased with the wide range of customization options that come included with Saxon.
Given all the layout tools, Saxon is a top choice for anyone looking for a viral blogging theme. The code is clean and SEO-friendly so that you can expect fast load times and decent search rankings from this mobile-friendly template.
6. BoomBox by PX Lab (Themeforest)
Theme Description
Boombox is another great option for building a viral news content website. Share memes and images, microblog the hottest headlines, or allow registered members to submit their own stories.
One thing that makes Boombox stand out its extreme flexibility. If you check out some of the demo sites, you’ll see what I mean. You can alter the appearance of this theme drastically from the screenshot that you see above. Everything from the header to the post layouts is customizable.
With bbPress and BuddyPress, Boombox can be used to create a full-fledged viral community website. You can let users friend and follow each other and publish complete forums. That said, these features are optional, so Boombox is also an excellent choice if you simply want to publish blog posts and viral videos by yourself or with an editorial team.
Boombox is also translation-ready, so it works great for non-English and multilingual websites. In fact, it even has RTL support.
7. King by Red Kings (Themeforest)
Theme Description
King is a cool theme for sharing all sorts of viral media. It handles images, audio, and video just as well, if not better than text-based content. In addition, it really shines as a community site where users can add their own posts.
Design and usability-wise, it’s somewhere between Buzzfeed and Reddit. The portfolio style layout found in the demo is reminiscent of Pinterest. Visitors can quickly scroll through lots of content. Images really shine in this layout, making it better for visual content more than links, articles, and Q&A posts.
Every post has integrated social media share buttons and some reaction buttons after the content, a lot like those you find on Facebook. You’ll have no trouble building an audience on the top social media sites with this viral content theme. It’s very well-designed for spurring interaction and engagement on the site. Users are awarded points for their engagement too. There are leaderboards for them to compete on, and they can earn badges as they hit new levels and milestones on the site.
The layouts in King aren’t that flexible, but you do get a good set of options. If you like the multi-column post layout feature above, you’ll appreciate the various styles available in this viral WordPress theme.
King is also frequently updated by its developers. Version 3 of the viral magazine theme included mega menus, new featured posts, grids, and a night mode, among other features.
8. SocialVideo by TemplateMonster
Theme Description
SocialVideo looks like a standard viral magazine site at first glance, but there’s a bit more to it than that. Click any post, and you’ll see that the Featured Images are frequently replaced with video embeds from popular platforms like Youtube. As the name implies, SocialVideo is a complete viral video website.
Thanks to the aesthetic of this template, it would work perfectly as a viral newspaper site. It’s fully responsive and fast loading, so you can expect visitors on mobile devices to have an excellent experience.
SocialVideo is full of theme options and integrations. You can choose from hundreds of fonts from Google Fonts, publish Instagram post feeds, add MailChimp email signup forms, and create contact forms with the Contact Form 7 plugin. Overall, it’s a well-made theme and a top contender for anyone building a video content website.
Which viral theme is best for you?
Need some final recommendations?
Maggz is perfect for a viral content site where you publish all the content as the site owner.
Bimber is a bit more complex but has gorgeous designs available and more functionality than Maggz. You can publish viral quizzes, allow voting, and much more.
BuddyBoss is the best theme if you want to create a social community site where members can post original memes, friend each other, and make content go viral on your own network.
I hope this collection of the best viral content WordPress themes helped you find the perfect template. If you’d like to share this article with someone else, you can use the buttons below.
