We can all agree that there are tons of news and magazine themes for WordPress, but some of them are truly special and build to last.
Important: This is not an affiliate post or has anything to do with the Jegtheme studio and it’s not related to jNews theme in any way.
This is our own based opinion and looks on jNews theme as one of the most popular news themes for WordPress at the time.
Today we are talking about one of such specific themes, the jNews theme made by Jegtheme studio. The theme is absolutely amazing, but we need to take a closer look to see if it’s truly the best news and magazine theme for WordPress, or not?
jNews Theme
jNews theme is published back in October of 2017. and so far it became a fully complete solution for desktop publishing. The theme fits great when it comes to the building of a news portal or magazine.
Be sure to also check our News & Magazine Themes Best of for 2020.
What are the Key features of jNews theme?
Well, the jNews theme has been under constant development and thus the theme got feature-rich over time, especially after the 7.0 update.
The theme supports the Elementor and WP Bakery Page builder
The jNews theme comes with awesome pre-built theme demos that you can import from the Theme Options panel quickly and easily. You can choose the demo importing based on the page builder of your choice.
Theme also works with the Gutenberg editor and you can currently use it for writing the posts. The pages are built with the Elementor or WP Bakery page builder.
Theme demo importing process works perfectly and you should have no problems with importing of desired demo content.
Some of the key features as the full list of features will be very long.
- Build upon Elementor and WP Bakery Page builder
- Pre-designed post layouts, lots of customization options
- Hero post layouts with lots of possible combination and style combinations
- Grid, Masonry, and Slider (Carousel) post module with lots of layout combinations
- Header builder with modules to make it look authentic and truly unique, separate design for mobile, tablet, and desktop header
- Sticky header, Megamenu, and Lightbox popup, Gallery, Related posts, and many other premium themes features like these built-in.
- Built-in Dark mode feature
- Advertisement system with options to separate ads based on devices like mobile phones, desktops, etc.
- User registration and login (popup) handling with front-end modal login box and support for Facebook, Google, and Twitter registration
- Lost of pre-built plugins for various purposes like Video, Weather Forecast, Social Login, Like & Rating system.
- The theme also includes PayWall, Recipe builder, Footer builder, Instagram feed, Browser notification plugin, Download module, Subscription management, Post splitting, and many more.
- Google AMP (14 Best AMP plugins for WordPress)and Facebook Instant Articles.
- jNews WordPress theme is optimized for performance and with some additional caching plugins you can score decent numbers on Google PageSpeed.
- Migration plugin for migrating your website from the other most popular news and magazine themes like Newspaper, Newsmag, Publisher, Sahifa, Soledad, etc.
In general, Jnews theme is packed with every possible feature some news company website might require. With jNews theme you can build any kind of news or magazine website you can think of.
Style customization in jNews theme
One of the most desired features of any premium WordPress theme is to be able to make it look unique and personally styled.
The jNews theme comes with full support for Yellow Pencil plugin.
Yellow Pencil
Yellow Pencil plugin allows you to visually modify any part of the website front-end design from the easy to use interface.
The Yellow pencil plugin comes with the options to change fonts, color, size and styling of any elements on the page. It can override the theme built in CSS and restyle any element.
The yellow pencil comes with some nice CSS3 effects, the ability to style the login page, Google Fonts, CSS Gradient effects, Stock photo library, and drag and drop builder.
The plugin is perfect for applying design customizations for designers, and developers who don’t like to code as it’s all done in the visual editor with live changes preview.
Addition layout and styling options
This theme allows you to set the desired with or the website wrapper and to customize the total width of your content on desktop, laptop, tablet, and mobile devices.
SEO support in jNews
jNews theme is covering the basic SEO principles and it also comes with the plugin for handling schema for posts, meta headers, and other basic SEO aspects. It also comes with its own plugin for adding open graph markup for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.
The theme is fully capable of running the basic SEO stuff for you considering the rich snippets for both posts and video posts, recipes, and CPT posts as well.
Custom taxonomy and Custom Post Types support
jNews Theme comes with full support for custom taxonomies and custom post types, you can even customize them using Yellow pencil or with custom block layouts from the theme options.
This feature requires installing the plugin for handling custom post types, it’s available under the WP admin -> jNews -> Install plugins. Here just look for the custom taxonomy plugins.
Excellent Support for major SEO plugins
We tested jNews with Yoast SEO, RankMath, and All in one SEO pack as the most popular SEO solutions for WordPress. jNews theme confirmed to be working very well with all of them.
We recommend using RankMath SEO plugin (our Rankmath review) as it offers the most out of your WordPress website on-page optimization efforts.
This option will allow you to change colors and apply different styles per each section of your Home page or other pages as well. You can even customize the category pages to create a truly different look per category.
jNews is WooCommerce ready
Yes, you can even sell products using WooCommerce with the jNews theme. If your news or media website is selling online, theme will surely fit very well.
Speed and performance in jNews theme
The theme is generally gone thru serious speed and performance optimization in the 7.0 version and beyond. It also comes with the minification option built-in. It supports the WP Super cache plugin, however, we tested it with Breeze, WP Rocket, and W3 Total cache and the theme is working pretty fast and score great on PageSpeed test.
However, please note that sometimes the overall performance on the PageSpeed test can be related to the total number of news blocks and elements. They are all adding to the total number of DOM elements and this can hurt overall PageSpeed ranking, especially on mobile devices.
Monetization and Advertising in jNews
The theme comes with the monetization system in perms that you can use PayWall plugin developed especially for jNews theme. It allows you to monetize your articles using a smart subscription system.
Ads system
There is also a built-in advertising system and allows you to place different kinds of ads thru out the website.
You can use slots to paste your script ads code or insert image and apply links. You can also use different image sizes per targeted devices.
The Bad side of jNews theme?
We listed all great features and taken the look of the good side, but now it’s time to shine the light on the bad things if any?
Weather forecast system is buggy, sometimes simply not displaying anything in header…
Well, one of the ugly things we encountered using the theme, is that the Weather Forecast plugin just simply not work or not working as it should. We hadn’t take time to inspect the issues, just disabled this feature and moved on.
The other thing that is not so good is the known problem related to any other theme that uses the page builder like Elementor in the first place… The overuse of DOM elements!!!
If you use Elementor to create complex layouts, you can count that the total number of DOM elements will pass the sane number of DOM elements. It can sometimes reach 2000 or 3000 elements which results in poor PageSpeed performance. Pretty much all other page builders are blotaing the DOM in the same way, only the Elementor makes it even worst.
Conslusion
We listed all the benefits of such feature rich niche theme like jNews. Is it the best news and magazine theme? Maybe, but it’s definitely the theme you should try if you are running news portal or some niche magazine like travel blog, recipe and cooking blog, fashion magazine or any kind of other desktop publishing and editorial website.
The theme has everything that the editorial website could ask for. If you have used jNews theme before or if you plan to use it, feel free to share your feedback with us. We are determined to find out is this the best news and magazine theme for WordPress that the world has to offer or not?
Thank you
Have been using jnews theme some months I really like it’s. Easy to customize.