News Portal Review: A Sleek Designed and Powerful WordPress Theme

Last Updated on January 17, 2025

In a world dominated by digital media and other platforms, it is very necessary to have a compelling website, especially if you are in the news industry.

The significance of a functional news portal cannot be overstated in the competitive world of the news industry. And if you’re in a WordPress field, choosing a competitive yet powerful WordPress theme is very important. That’s where we would like you to introduce the News Portal.

A fitting name for fitting WordPress themes for news websites.

In this article, we’ll discuss this theme, its standout features, and what makes it different from the rest of the theme for news-focused websites. This review will revolve around the theme’s usefulness, features, designs, and overall experience of how I or other users feel about it.

What is News Portal WordPress Theme?

News Portal WordPress Theme is one of the best WordPress themes developed by Mystery Themes for news portal websites. News Portal WordPress Theme has everything from showcasing a wonderful design to utilizing some powerful features.

Key Features

There’s a reason why more than 7,000+ users love this theme and are currently using it.

News Portal features some of the most sleek and intriguing design options that you can find in any WordPress theme. From unlimited color options to multiple layout sections, you can access every feature you need and desire for your WordPress website.

• Fully Customizable Design: Explore the limitless ability to customize your WordPress website with a news portal. The theme offers a range of layout options for creating a unique and professional news website. With this theme, you can also easily change your site’s fonts, colors, and layouts.
• Responsive and Mobile Friendly: The New Portal is optimized for seamless performance across all devices, like desktops and mobiles.
• Widget-Based Layouts: With this theme, You can enjoy widget-based layouts for your site.
• Multiple Demo Options: There are multiple pre-built demos for those wanting to start their website quickly.
• Category-based customizations: Enable category-based customizations, including specific colors for individual categories to distinguish various sections of your news website.
• SEO-Optimized and User-Friendly Interface: Enjoy the clean designs, codes, and SEO-friendly structure provided by the News Portal to improve your site’s visibility in various search engines like Google and Bing.
• Translation and RTL ready: The theme is fully compatible with various translation plugins like WPML and Polylang to give your site limitless worldwide exposure, avoiding all language barriers for your news.
• Cross-browser compatible: No matter what browsers your users are using, the theme is fully compatible with any browsers like Chrome, Edge, Mozilla, and Opera to give your users an uninterrupted experience of your website.
• Dedicated Support and Documentations: There is a detailed documentation of this theme if you get stuck in any customizations of the theme. Moreover, you can also enjoy dedicated support if you have any issues when using the theme.

My Experience on Using News Portal

Let’s discuss the real-life experience of using News Portal as a main theme. We’ll also see examples of how this theme performs on a real-life website.

Before starting to use the theme, I initiated some tests. For the test, I looked for the site’s speed before and after the contents were placed. Moreover, I also looked at their customizers and determined the core features enabled that’ll help the news publishers.

How did I test the theme?

The theme was tested on a staging site with the help of TasteWP, a wonderful platform to quickly set up a staging site for playing around within WordPress.

Let’s look at the tests step by step.

1. I created a site using Taste WP to create a dummy WordPress website where I installed News Portal.
2. To get the information about the theme, I didn’t add any content and tested the site’s speed on platforms like Yellow Lab Tools and Page Speed Insights. (results will be shown later in the blog.)
3. Then I navigated to the editor of the theme and used various features and customizations available for the theme.
4. After the customizations, I created another site, but this time, I used content from demos of the theme. This helped me widen my view about how the theme can affect the servers if the site has heavier resources.

Let’s take a look at my findings on the theme.

My Findings

Speed

Before the contents were added, the site was very fast to respond and display whatever resources or designs pretty quickly.

Page Speed Insights and Yellow Lab Tools provided positive results on the site.

However, with content on the site, the site’s speed and overall performance are reduced from green to yellow.

The site may be filled with some unoptimized content, but the reduction in the site’s speed also showcases that it is not ideally lightweight and super fast theme. But with the right resources and methods, you can make this theme as fast as you need.

Customizations

After running through customizations, I found the navigation to be quite easy. Meaning there are exactly the right customization options and features for every section of the site.

The headers, footers, sidebars, and menus are all there for you to customize personally.

I had little time to figure out where and what of the theme, but if you’ve used these kinds of themes, you’ll get started quickly.

Demos

The various starter sites of this theme are pretty well made. It consists of all necessary navigations, from menus to breadcrumbs, to give your users ease in navigating. Moreover, the layouts are also selected because they’ll provide more clarity to your users while reading your content.

Overall, my customizations and other experiences with the theme were pretty good, and the interface is well-diversified so that even first-time users can quickly know what’s what.

Real-life example for News Portal

No huge brands are using this theme. But according to BuiltWith, there are 24000+ websites historically using these themes. I found one low-key website from two of the most well-known African nations.

Kenya News Agency

One of them is Kenya News Agency. The site is very responsive across all devices, giving users an equal experience wherever they use their website.

Although the site’s response to servers and their speed depends on various factors, the theme also plays a noticeable part. Since I found the response and load time of the site to be fast (at least for the news portal website), I will give News Portal (the theme) the benefit of the doubt.

Furthermore, the site’s structure and design choices perfectly represent what a news website should be.

Feel free to check it out yourself for your analysis. Here’s the list of websites using News Portal

Now, let’s check out the pros and cons of using this website.

Pros of News Portal WordPress theme

1. 1. User-friendly designs and easy-to-navigate customizer: One of the best features of this theme is its design. The theme offers clean and perfect layouts, which makes it easy for users in every category to customize and navigate.
   2. Custom widgets for easier accessibility and navigation: News Portal includes multiple custom widgets specifically for news websites like featured posts, recent articles, and category blocks, which helps in enhancing user engagements and site usability.
   3. SEO-Optimized and responsive for all devices: The theme scores perfectly when it comes to SEO. With highly optimized resources and clean codes, you’ll get a huge boost in ranking your site better on search engines.

Cons of News Portal WordPress theme

1. 1. Limited Free Features: While the free version offers some useful features and functions, the advanced customization options are generally locked behind a paywall, ruining the experience for some users.
   2. Learning Curve for Beginners: The News Portal theme is very friendly, no doubt about that. However, complete WordPress beginners might have difficulty familiarizing themselves with the customization options for a while.
   3. High dependency on plugins: The theme may have many features and functionalities. However, you may have to rely on third-party resources like plugins to achieve full functionality with this theme.

Who should use this theme?

While creating this theme, the primary focus seems to be on the news-focused website (the name itself is a greater proof), but with the right customizations and designs, you can improve this theme to familiarize yourself with your niche.

But let’s check out for which group or niche this theme is ideal for:

1. News Portal and Online Magazine Agencies
2. Content Creators and Bloggers:
3. Small to medium-sized publishers
4. Non-profits and community-based

These groups will find the News Portal perfect for their websites. However, if you want a lightweight, low-resource theme that can be implemented for any niche or group, this might not be right for you.

But if you want a dedicated theme for your niche that features the proper functions that your industry’s site should have and if your niche is the industry, then News Portal is the right WordPress theme.