Mission News Review: Is It The Best WordPress News Theme?

News websites are gaining enormous popularity nowadays. With the busy schedule of life and everyday rushes, people get very little time to read a newspaper or view a television news channel. They want short stories for quick reading and want to get straight to the information they are looking for. A WordPress news website gives them the option and a WordPress news theme is a way of showing the trending news portal that lets them check the current news even when they are traveling.

There are many people who love to write about current affairs and are venturing to create news websites today. On the other hand, traditional newspapers or TV news channels are also coming up with their online versions. In such a situation, if you are planning to create a WordPress news site, it is a big challenge. And the easiest way to cope up with it is to find an ideal WordPress news theme. You need to make sure that your theme is responsive and easily customizable as it defines the look of a website. And the look is the first thing that grabs the attention of the viewers.              

When you look for a WordPress news theme, you need to make sure that it offers you all the features that you need to present your news stories in an appealing way and to increase the readability of your stories. There also needs to be smooth and easy navigation for the convenience of the readers. Design is another important aspect.

But it is really difficult to get all of these features on a news site. And, if you are a WordPress user, the market is flooded with thousands of options. Often, you get tired of searching for the right news theme. Many times you get confused about which one to go for.   

To help you make the right decision, we are reviewing one of the best WordPress news themes in the market, Mission News. So, let’s get started! 

What is WordPress news theme? 

A WordPress news theme lays the foundation for a WordPress news website or online magazine. It defines the design of it and lets you give an attractive look to your website. It offers you unique features to structure your news stories properly and display them nicely on your website. 

Mission News: An overview 

Mission News is an elegant WordPress newspaper theme exclusively designed for publishers. Its traditional look that follows the pattern of a newspaper gives the readers the feeling that they are simply reading a newspaper online.

This WordPress news theme follows the layout pattern of The New York Times, A leading news daily of Newyork and one of the oldest newspapers of the world. The classy aesthetics and the rich features let you add credibility to every single story that you present to your readers. It brings along a ton of tools to make your posts and pages appealing and impressive.      

The vintage design with three column layout provides you with plenty of space to accommodate vast contents. You can feature news items from diverse categories and showcase the live updates from your social feeds on your pages. Apart from all these unique features in this WordPress news theme, there is an advanced search bar in the header section. The readers can use this to search for news stories based on topics and categories.    

Mission News is child theme compatible and SEO ready that supports all modern WordPress plugins. Whenever you feel like extending the functionality of your site, you can easily do that simply by installing a plugin. The theme is beginner-friendly.

There is a dedicated support team. On the official website of Complete Themes, there are 16 step by step tutorials for Mission News to show the users how to use this WordPress news theme in detail.        

Important Links:

• Go to website
• Mission News Free 
• Mission News Pro 
• Documentation
• Demo
• Support

Installation and Activation

The free edition, available in the official WordPress repository. It can be installed and activated just like any other WordPress theme.

1. Go to your WordPress admin dashboard and click on Appearance.
2. Click on the themes tab and then Add New 
3. In the search icon on the top type Mission News. Alternatively you can download the zip folder from WordPress.org and upload it.  

4. After you installed the theme just click on Activate to start customizing. 

Installing Mission News Pro 

Mission News Pro is a plugin that only works when the Mission News WordPress theme is installed and activated. After you have purchased Mission News Pro follow these steps to install and activate it- 

1. Go to your WordPress dashboard and click Plugin -> Add New
2. Upload the zip folder and click Install Now -> Activate plugin
3. Now go to Appearance menu and click on the Mission News dashboard 

4. Enter your license key and click Activate License to activate the plugin. 

Key features of Mission News: WordPress News Theme  

1. Layout customisation 

Mission News theme comes with no limitation when it comes to customization. You get a bunch of customization options from the customizer, from changing to layouts to sidebars. This WordPress news theme comes with a plethora of options to change the look and feel of your news website. The most amazing feature I found was that you can edit the layout right from the editor!

The layout is the most important aspect of a website and it is the first thing that a visitor sees on your website. If it doesn’t grab their attention they’ll bounce off. But you don’t have to worry about that with this theme. Mission News offers you a ton of easy and quick customization options.

2. Responsive design 

The browsing habit of purple has changed completely over the last decade. Nowadays, people use their smartphones more to go online. Even today, most people go for online news portals when they lack time to read the detailed stories of the newspapers. You need to make sure that you make your website mobile-friendly otherwise, it is a big drawback for you.

Mission News relieves you from this.  Though this WordPress News Theme carries a typical old school look, it fits any screen size easily. The mobile menu can handle 3 or 4 tier menus without distorting the look or affecting the user experience. It can handle the most complex navigation system with ease.  

3. Performance 

Everyone prefers a website that loads quickly. A slow site creates irritation and many times because of slow speed, websites lose half of their visitors. According to a survey 47 percent of consumers expect a web page to load in two seconds or less. And a lot of it depends on the kind of theme you use.

Mission News is well known for its performance and has a blazing fast loading speed. It is built while keeping the code and structure optimized so that performance isn’t an issue.  All the CSS and Javascript files in this: WordPress news theme is compressed or concentrated.

4. Ad ready 

If you want to earn from your website besides presenting news stories to your readers, Mission News provides you with an easy option for monetizing your site. It comes with readymade ad widgets that allow you to run ads from various sources on your site. You can place your ads on your pages on the above or below the posts. You can also display the ads on the left or right sidebars.  

5. Social media icons 

Social media is one of the best platforms to promote your WordPress news websites. Nowadays, social media is favoured by most of the people cutting all age barriers. The other advantage is, it has a global reach.

Mission News has easy social sharing options where you can share your news stories in all the modern social media platforms from your theme dashboard. This: WordPress news theme has ready social media icons in the customization section of the theme. You just have to select the platform you want to use and add the URL to make your stories circulate easily on social media.   

Now let’s dig in through some of the Pro features of Mission News…

1. Adding and customising your header image

Mission News is one of the rare WordPress news themes that allows you to add a header image i.e an extra image in the header area usually above the navigation menu. It is usually a fullscreen image on the head of your website. To add and customize the header image just go to:

1. Customizer -> Header Image
2. Select the image you want to upload 
3. Click Save & Publish

You can customize the image as per your needs. There are options to adjust the height. You can make the height responsive or keep it fixed and it is even possible to link the header image to the homepage. You can decide whether to show it on all the pages or on the homepage only.   

2. Change your fonts easily 

The pro version of this WordPress news theme comes with 728 different fonts. You can have a preview of all the fonts before using them from Google Fonts Websites. You can change your fonts by simply visiting the “Fonts” section under the “customization” tab in your left sidebar. You need to download the fonts you wish to use. The theme lets you select a weight for your fonts.     

3. Add and customise the news ticker 

Mission News Pro allows you to display news tickers either on the top of the button of different pages of your website with eye-catching headlines. Enabling the “News Ticker” is dead simple. Just go to the customizer and click on the News Ticker tab.

Now go to the content  tab and enable the settings to Yes.  Just select the posts or page that you want to display on top of your website. 

4. Make the header sticky

Statistics show that a sticky header can increase your conversion rate by 30%. With a sticky header, users are able to jump to different sections easily as the menu bar always appears on the screen. 

Here’s how you can create a sticky header with Mission Pro. Go to Appearance > Customize > Header > Sticky Header to turn it on. 

5. Change the footer text 

The pro version of the WordPress news theme allows you to add your own footer texts to your website. The theme comes with a default footer text “Mission News WordPress Theme by Complete Themes”. But, you can change it as per your choice by going to Appearance -> Customize -> Footer text in your theme dashboard. 

Image: Compete themes

Final thoughts… 

Mission News is a unique theme that combines a vintage look with a modern responsive design. The WordPress news theme offers you a ton of customization options to shape your news website as per the choice of your readers. It lets you monetize your website by having an Ad spot. The speed optimization and some best SEO practices that it follows ensure a good position in the search engine result pages. 

The theme is available in both free and premium versions. So, the beginners can try the free version first and then upgrade to the premium one if they need to. Considering all these features, we may definitely come to the conclusion that Mission News is one of the best news WordPress themes available in the market.  It is difficult to find any other free theme that offers so many features and such a high degree of flexibility.      

Our Verdict

Our expert gave a solid 4.75 out of 5 to Mission News in their review. Here are the details of the parameters – 

Features	4/5
Ease Of Use	5/5
Support	5/5
Documentation	5/5
Value For Money	5/5