When you think of viral content, you probably think of YouTube videos with millions of views or TikTok videos with billions of likes.
The good news is that if you allow users to create similar content on your website, you can use it to capture qualified traffic — all without having to write a single word.
With the right viral WordPress theme, you can encourage front-end submissions, engage users, and generate passive income via display ads, subscriptions, or affiliate links. Even more, by offering a social sharing option, you ensure the content continues to be shared over social media, driving more traffic to your site and increasing your income.
In this post, we share the top viral WordPress themes for magazines, newspapers, blogs, video streaming sites, and publishers. Let’s get started.
Best Viral Content WordPress Themes
The following viral WordPress themes have distinct functionalities, features, and layouts. They have all been created with engaging designs, ensuring your visitors don't leave your site.
1. BoomBox
BoomBox is a best-selling WordPress theme that includes all the “buzz” features you need to make a viral content website. It includes the Zombify plugin, which allows users to upload content in the front-end. With it, users can effortlessly create news, polls, and quizzes. They can also create interactive and visual stories, create memes, react to content using cute badges, and share gifs.
BoomBox also lets you build an online community, since it’s compatible with BuddyPress, a forum plugin. To promote engagement, you can list the posts based on the numbers of shares, views, and other popularity metrics.
Why We Love It
BoomBox is an extremely powerful viral WordPress theme that’s versatile and SEO-optimized. It offers 16 well-designed demos with one-click installation. You can monetize the content via affiliate programs and the WPQUADS AdSense plugin.
Pricing: $59 one-time fee
2. Bimber
Bimber is a viral WordPress theme that offers 22 demos for creating a functional and mobile-friendly viral content website. The theme offers one-click demo installation, allowing you to set up the website in no more than 24 hours.
The theme comes bundled with the Snax viral content builder, which lets users build and create listicles, memes, quizzes, and polls. It’s integrated with the BuddyPress and bbPress plugins to encourage users to interact with each other. The MashShare plugin, which also comes pre-installed, allows you to add social sharing buttons to each new piece of content to optimize its viral potential.
Additional features include custom Facebook widgets, multiple header and color options, and different templates for a variety of posts.
Why We Love It
Bimber is an excellent option for creating a viral content website. It allows front-end users to react with badges, features a responsive design, includes caching plugins, and is SEO-optimized. Its RTL language support makes it a great fit for viral websites in Hebrew or Arabic.
Pricing: $59 one-time fee
3. King
A custom-created theme for viral content sites, King comes with a modern design and an engaging layout. It supports all viral content types such as videos, images, polls, lists, and quizzes.
King’s front-end submission and community-building features are powerful. Aside from allowing users to up-vote and down-vote submissions, users can reply to each other with gifs and bookmark each other’s content. Users can also create groups based on common interests and receive notifications when other people comment, like, or engage with the content they’ve posted.
It also offers visitors a private messaging option and a leaderboard. With this theme, your website users will be engaged beyond reading each other’s content — they can compete, message each other, and create communities.
Why We Love It
King is a fantastic option for building a viral website with a strong online community component. It also allows easy monetization with ads, affiliate links, and sponsored posts. Monetization is a key component of a viral website, because you won’t be selling any products. If you do want to sell products, King includes a storefront feature.
Pricing: $59 one-time fee
4. Saxon
Saxon is a viral WordPress theme that is best suited toward magazine, news, and blog websites. It features a more traditional design than other options on this list, making it a great fit for you if you’re planning to create a website about a more “serious” topic. These may include activism, finance, sports, politics, and more.
The best part about Saxon is that it gives you plenty of flexibility when it comes to the type of site that you want to create. While it includes several powerful magazine and blog demos, it also includes demos for traditional websites. So if you’re teetering between launching a viral website and a business website, Saxon is an excellent compromise between the two.
Why We Love It
Saxon is an excellent choice for those who want to launch a viral magazine website, but who are also considering creating a business website. It offers more traditional designs, plenty of demo choices, and various layouts for individual posts. It also features a drag-and-drop page builder for easy customization.
Pricing: $59 one-time fee
5. Buzz Stone
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Buzz Stone is a viral WordPress theme that is optimized for mobile and is easy to customize. It supports the WPBakery page builder for code-free customization.
Unlike some of the other options on this list, which include separate demos, Buzz Stone includes one demo with several home page and layout options. That way, you can build your site exactly the way you want to, mixing and matching components to create a viral site that works for you.
The theme allows users to like and share posts. To enable front-end submissions from users, you’d have to install a separate plugin, which is the only negative for this theme. It could be a positive, however, if you’re interested in a certain plugin and wouldn’t have wanted your theme to come bundled with one.
Why We Love It
Buzz Stone is a simple but powerful viral WordPress theme that’s easy to set up and adjustable for a variety of purposes. You can set up an online store, allow advertising on your website, and send emails with its MailChimp integration.
Pricing: $59 one-time fee
6. Click Mag
Click Mag is a viral WordPress theme that’s ideal for blogs and magazines. It’s fully responsive and is bundled with the Theia post slider plugin to features posts and pages below the header of your site. It also includes a reviewer plugin for inserting reviews into your posts. You can use these reviews to include affiliate links and easily turn readers into sources of passive income.
If you want to set up a store, Click Mag has you covered: It’s compatible with WooCommerce to sell products and services online. You can also allow advertising with the theme’s unlimited ad units. If you want to build a community, the theme is compatible with bbPress.
Why We Love It
Click Mag is an excellent viral magazine WordPress theme that offers plenty of customization options and one-click demo installation. It allows you to replace featured images with audio or videos from YouTube, Vimeo, and SoundCloud, making it an excellent choice for you if you’re planning to promote audiovisual content.
Just don’t forget to meet web accessibility standards when promoting your audio and video content.
Pricing: $49 one-time fee
7. PRESSO
PRESSO is a versatile WordPress theme created for blogs, newspapers, magazines, and viral websites. When you install PRESSO, you get access to over 40 content blocks, several layout options for your reviews, and various ad locations for monetizing your website.
The theme is integrated with WooCommerce for setting up an online store and bbPress for creating an online community. You get access to a one-click demo installer, which allows you to set up your site without needing to code. The theme is mobile- and SEO-optimized.
PRESSO doesn’t come bundled with a page builder, but is Gutenberg-optimized. If you prefer using WordPress’s native block editor, this is the theme for you.
Why We Love It
PRESSO is an excellent theme for anyone who’d like to build a robust viral or magazine website. Because of its diverse content blocks and various options for displaying reviews, it’s a great choice for those who’d like to build a viral review website.
Pricing: $45 one-time fee
8. Buzz
Buzz is a powerful magazine WordPress theme that’s ideal for creating a minimal viral website. Its one-click demo installation feature allows you to get your website up and running in a few simple clicks.
The theme offers forty layout combinations for posts and pages, five pagination styles, and nine header styles to make your website design pop. It’s Bootstrap-based, meaning it uses one of the most popular and efficient website building frameworks today.
Because of its focus on a more subdued aesthetic, this theme is ideal for you if you’d like to launch a fashion, travel, or personal viral website. It offers a dedicated RTL demo, so if you’re planning to publish content in an RTL language such as Arabic, consider installing Buzz or a similar RTL theme.
Why We Love It
Buzz is an excellent choice for creating a viral website with style. The theme focuses on understated typography and photography. If you’re not a fan of the designs of traditional viral websites, consider opting for Buzz.
Pricing: $49 one-time fee
9. TopNews
TopNews is a magazine WordPress theme that includes a viral website demo, making it easy to launch a viral content website in minutes. The theme gives you access to various header, title, menu, and layout options to further customize your site after installing the premade demo.
It uses the WPBakery page builder for easy and code-free customization. It also includes a social counter widget and popular post widget to promote your best-performing viral content. The theme is SEO-optimized and mobile-friendly.
Why We Love It
TopNews is a great choice for building a viral content website with recognizable viral elements, such as share counters and popular posts. Its multitude of layout and customization options allow you to make your site look the way you want without overwhelming you with choices. It’s an easy and straightforward option with a lower price point than the other options on this list.
Pricing: $49 one-time fee
10. True Mag
True Mag is a viral content theme with a strong emphasis on video content. Its primary demo includes a “Submit Video” button on the upper right-hand corner, allowing website visitors to submit a video straightaway. You can also feature a similar button to encourage users to submit videos to your website.
The theme is responsive, SEO-optimized, and customizable via a drag-and-drop editor, meaning that you won’t have to touch a single line of code. It features eleven home page slider styles and wide and boxed layouts. You can promote popular videos, trending videos, and top authors using the theme’s pre-built widgets.
Why We Love It
True Mag is an excellent choice for those who’d like to make a video-based viral website. Its video-related features and functionalities outperform those of the other themes on this list. It’s also compatible with WooCommerce, BuddyPress, and bbPress, making it easy to monetize your site and build a social community.
Pricing: $41 one-time fee
11. Grand Magazine
Grand Magazine is a modern viral WordPress theme that includes forty pre-designed layouts for pages and posts. It features a rounded design for its buttons and tags and includes infinite scroll to keep users on the page. This increases your dwell time, a key SEO metric.
On the upper right-hand corner, users have access to a series of filters, including “Latest,” “Trending,” “Hot,” and “Editor Picks.” It’s compatible with WooCommerce, allowing you to sell products and services through your viral website.
Why We Love It
Grand Magazine is a modern viral magazine theme that’s optimized for promoting your website’s top content. While it offers plenty of premade layouts, it also gives you the option to customize using WordPress’ live customizer and includes an infinite scroll option for both pages and blog posts.
Pricing: $49 one-time fee
12. Ruki
While Ruki is advertised as a personal blog theme, it’s an outstanding option for creating a modern viral website with multiple categories and archive pages. It works with the Gutenberg block editor, so if you prefer to work with Gutenberg, this theme is a great option for you.
You can add sidebars and advertising widgets within posts to monetize your blog posts through AdSense. It also includes a built-in related posts carousel, encouraging deep site navigation.
Ruki is best suited for viral websites that are primarily post- or text-based. If you’d like to allow users to submit viral content, use a front-end posting plugin. And if you’d like to create an online social community, you can pair it with the BuddyPress plugin.
Why We Love It
Ruki is a fantastic choice for you if you’re planning to launch a blog with viral potential — especially if you’re planning to write in different categories and industries. The theme is mobile-optimized and offers various customization options, including nine sidebar designs, three post styles, and eight single-post layouts.
Pricing: $59 one-time fee
13. Kicker
Kicker is a magazine WordPress theme that can be used to create a viral content website. It’s Affiliate website demo includes a trending section and the ability to designate certain posts as sponsored. It’s the only theme on this list that uses the Elementor page builder, so if you enjoy using Elementor, consider choosing Kicker as your theme.
Kicker allows you to set up a WooCommerce store and banner ads for easy monetization. You can enable signups with the ProfilePress plugin, which is compatible with the theme.
Why We Love It
Kicker’s sponsored post option makes it a fantastic choice for you if you’re planning to publish sponsored posts on your viral website. It’s SEO-optimized and compatible with Elementor, one of the top drag-and-drop page builders for WordPress.
Pricing: $39 one-time fee
A Profitable Viral Website is One Theme Away
With the right theme, you can set up a high-performing viral website that ranks high in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and drives traffic to all of your posts. The right theme will also encourage users to keep engaging with your content, boosting your passive income from display ads and affiliate links.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in October 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
