Buzzfeed gets over 200 million unique visitors per month. Vox gets over 24 million per month. Thought Catalog does too. These are just a few of the top viral sites ranked by Aelieve.
Viral sites like Buzzfeed, Vox, and Thought Catalog generate a significant amount of traffic because their content is constantly being forwarded to friends or posted on social sites. These sites typically excel in bringing in revenue, increasing brand awareness, and generating leads as well.
If you'd like to reap these benefits for your own business, then you want to create a site that makes it as easy as possible for visitors to find, read, and share your content. On WordPress, you can pick a content sharing theme that checks off all these boxes and can increase your own chances of going viral. Below we'll take a closer look at the best content sharing themes for WordPress.
Best Content Sharing WordPress Themes
The best content sharing WordPress themes provide a clean interface for visitors to not only read your articles and easily find similar content but also to share it. These themes will have prominent search features, widgets for creating displays of your most recent posts, and colorful social sharing buttons, among other elements. Let's check out your top options below.
1. BoomBox
If you want to create your own viral content site that looks like Buzzfeed or 9GAG, BoomBox is the theme you need. BoomBox provides a robust social sharing system powered by the MashShare plugin. You’ll get fully customizable social sharing buttons, a sticky sharing bar, and share counters.
With this theme, you can post lists, videos, polls, audio clips, embedded Tweets, and other types of content. This theme offers an easy option for visitors to upload content from the front end of your site as well.
It comes with a super flexible post voting system so you can create your own group of posts based on different criterions, like most voted, most viewed, and most discussed. This allows visitors to find and view the most popular content on your site fast. They can even add badges to their votes.
2. NewsPaper
With its tabbed homepage design, NewsPaper is an ideal choice for viral content websites. In addition to being fast loading, it offers a responsive layout that is designed to keep visitors engaged with your content. It offers dozens of well-designed sticky social share buttons for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, and email that you can place at the top of each blog post. It also has a widget for displaying social follow buttons for Facebook, Instagram, reddit, Dribbble, Behance, SoundCloud, and more so you can grow your following.
Other key features of NewsPaper are:
- fluid design
- featured posts widget
- unlimited color options andbackgrounds
- parallax scrolling effect
- hundreds of Google Fonts
3. King
King is a top-rated viral magazine theme that comes packed with features. It offers unique post types, including list, poll, and trivia quiz formats, as well as social share buttons and share counters.
Visitors can do a lot more than share content with this theme, though. They can also comment on posts with GIFs and emojis. They can up or down vote posts as well as comments. They can create an account. They can bookmark content. They can get notifications when they get new followers, comments, replies, or likes, and much more.
4. Gauge
Gauge is a multipurpose WordPress theme that's best suited for viral content sites, review sites, and community sites.
Gauge comes with a built-in review system that supports site admin and user ratings, sorting and filtering options by ratings, and rich snippets in SERPs. Using this built-in system, you can create comprehensive reviews for any kind of content — from games to movies to food, and more — using multiple rating criteria, including good and bad points. You can then add multiple social sharing options to these reviews, including Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Pinterest, Gmail, Tumblr, and more.
Gauge offers other features, including:
- menu options
- sliders
- Font Icons
- portfolio options
- video header options
5. PRESSO
PRESSO is a modern Gutenberg-ready WordPress theme that's ideal for news sites, magazines, and other viral content sites. To make it easy for visitors to share your content, PRESSO offers social sharing icons for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest with hover effects.
PRESSO also provides multiple navigation features — including nine mega menu layouts, off-canvas navigation, instant AJAX search, and infinite scrolling — to make it easy for visitors to browse. It comes with built-in ad locations and an advanced review system as well, making it perfect for review sites that earn revenue.
6. Saxon
Saxon is a viral magazine and newspaper WordPress theme that provides social share and follow buttons. These social media links are in the navbar, at the bottom of each post, in authors' bios, and in the website footer so visitors have multiple chances to share your content or follow your accounts as they browse.
Saxon also provides 27 homepage blocks that you can drag and drop onto any demo to add features like a display of your most recent posts or an "Editor's Pick" badge. You can also embed Tweets, Instagram feeds, and reviews into your posts and pages to keep visitors engaged.
7. Vlogger Video Blog
Vlogger Video Blog is one of the best free WordPress themes for bloggers. It comes with Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter social sharing icons, which you can place at the top of every blog post to encourage visitors to share.
In the sidebar, it includes a search box, display of recent posts, and links to major social media profiles, among other features. This can help boost time spent on site and your social media following.
8. Click Mag
Click Mag is designed for viral sites and blogs. If offers colorful social sharing icons for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and email so visitors have a variety of share options to choose from. It also allows you to place social media links in author bios and the website footer so you can expand your business's and writers' followings.
To make your content as engaging and visible as possible, Click Mag comes bundled with several premium plugins that enable you to create dynamic slideshows, add reviews and comparison tables to your posts, and make a sticky sidebar.
9. Weltgeist
Weltgeist is a bold news and magazine theme that offers a wide selection of fonts, animation effects, and templates that you can mix and match. You can easily add social sharing functionality to your posts and pages thanks to Weltgeist's social icons widget. There's icons for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, tumblr, and VK, which is a wider selection than most themes offer.
Weltgeist also allows you to embed a variety of media, including SoundCloud links, Spotify playlists, YouTube videos, and more.
10. Foot
Foot is a front-end content sharing WordPress theme with a modern grid design and tons of amazing features, like:
- unlimited sidebars
- live search
- built-in review system
- Google snippets
- AJAX login and registration forms
It also offers six design options to help you create a unique site, including a Pinterest-style layout.
11. Socially Viral
As the name suggests, SociallyViral is a magazine-style theme specifically designed to help you create a viral content site on WordPress. It provides colorful social sharing buttons for Facebook, Twitter, reddit, Pinterest, Mix, and email that you can place at the top and bottom of every blog post. It also has social follow buttons so you can easily build up your following online.
While feature-rich, SociallyViral is also fast loading. That means your content can have a better chance of ranking in search engines, which can help drive more traffic to your site.
12. Pin
Inspired by Pinterest, Pin provides a clean and responsive design and easy-to-use interface with lots of sharing options. On the homepage as well as each individual blog post, you can add share buttons for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, WhatsApp, and email.
This theme also provides rich front-end functionality, allowing visitors to edit, create, view, delete, and thumbs up existing posts and submit new content. It also has a live search feature, which helps your visitors find the results they’re looking for even before they finish typing their keyword.
Because of these features and more, Pin is great for portfolios and other image-rich websites.
13. UpVote
Inspired by Reddit, UpVote is ideal for content sharing and user-generated sites. In addition to being able to share posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, users can up or down vote posts. They can also create an account, submit their own content (called "stories"), and comment on others'.
UpVote also provides the following:
- powerful typography options
- unlimited colors
- user dashboards
- related stories widget
14. Food & Cook
Food & Cook is a highly-rated WordPress theme that offers many features and customization options to help you create a successful food blog. This theme provides several social share buttons for Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Flickr, and YouTube. In addition to sharing posts, visitors can rate your recipes and submit their own.
Food & Cook also offers six homepage demos, 11 inner page templates, a 404 page template, and a powerful theme options panel. This will make designing your content sharing site easy.
15. MagXP
MagXP is a magazine theme designed for flexibility and readability. Ideal for any content-rich site, MagXP theme comes with four homepage designs that you can easily customize with a drag-and-drop builder. It has a wide variety of layout options, including Default, Shop, Health, Entertainment, Technology, News, Relationship, Social, and Sports, that you can mix and match to create your site. It also provides social sharing buttons, which you can drag and drop into different places on your posts and pages.
Using the theme’s built-in review system, you can easily add reviews for affiliate products, movies, recipes, and more to your site. These are highlighted in search results, which will attract more visitors.
16. Polite
Polite is a free WordPress theme best suited for magazine and news sites. It comes with 6 pre-built demos as well ascustom widgets for adding author information, a display of featured posts, and social icons. You can place these social icons in your navbar to gain followers and add the bottom of your blog posts to encourage visitors to share them. The share buttons are for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, and have hover effects to catch the reader's eye.
Other key features are a search tool, off-canvas sidebar, featured slider, multiple footer options, and more.
17. Bimber
Bimber is a best-selling WordPress theme for viral content sites. To keep your visitors engaged and on your site, this theme enables you to filter posts on the homepage, build responsive video playlists, add a product carousel to a post, include related posts at the bottom of pages, and more.
The theme also gives visitors the power to submit links, text posts, and images and embed content from YouTube, Instagram, or Facebook. They can even create memes with a meme generator. To ensure visitors are engaging with others’ content as well, the theme allows them to upvote and downvote content and share it across their social media platforms.
18. Uploader
Uploader is an advanced content sharing WordPress theme that allows you to create a stunning community site where users can upload and share media with each other.
This theme comes with a built-in membership system, where your user can log in and register on the front end of your site. Users will have their own dashboard to manage their profile and follow other users.
Other key features of the Uploader theme are:
- 2 demo sites
- infinite scrolling
- custom email templates
- AJAX-powered filter options
19. SocialChef
SocialChef is one of the best BuddyPress themes for building a community site on WordPress. Specifically designed for food and recipe community sites, this theme provides social share buttons for Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest so visitors can share your recipes with their followers.
It also offers:
- front-end submission functionality
- activity feeds
- flexible rating system
- advanced search
20. Jabberjaw
Jabberjaw is a premium WordPress theme that is created for content-rich websites specifically. It comes with built-in social sharing functionality so you can display share counts and add buttons for up to 40 networks on your posts and page.This theme also allows users to submit content to your site from the front end, and create an account.
Other key features are:
- Visual Composer page builder included
- unlimited colors
- mega menu options
- related posts widget
21. Viral
Viral is a free theme by MyThemeShop that's specifically designed for viral content sites. It comes with four demos that are designed for different niches, including a default, photography, cat, and food demo. It also provides a huge selection of stylish social media sharing icons for Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, Dropbox, Behance, Vimeo, Dribbble, and more.
Every post also comes with an up and down voting button so users can rate your content in addition to sharing it.
Picking a Content Sharing Theme for Your WordPress Site
Any of the content sharing themes above can help you create a WordPress site that's easy to read, navigate, and share. Pick the one that provides the design and functionality that most closely meets your needs — then, you can focus on creating viral content.
Editor's note: This post was originally published in October 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
