Content curation is a hot topic these days. With the abundance of information available on the internet, people simply do not have the time to search and browse everything they want to read. Instead, people want all of it in one convenient location ready for them to explore without the hassle of scouring the internet.
In short, your website visitors want to be told what is worth reading and sharing. That’s why content curation is such a useful tactic.
Here at WP Mayor, we have discussed some of the best content curation tools of the year, provided examples of exceptional content curation websites we love to visit, and have even given you the low down on all things RSS and duplicate content related to avoid being labelled as “spammy”.
However, today we will take it one step further. We will look at what content curation is, the best WordPress plugin for building an RSS feed curation website, and the top WordPress themes to complement the delivery of information to your loyal followers.
What is Content Curation?
Content curation is the act of collecting a large amount of highly valuable and relevant content from several reputable websites and sharing it with your own website visitors. When curating content, you pick only the best, most significant pieces of content. In addition, you organize it in a meaningful way so that your site visitors can easily scan and consume all of the information they are interested in.
Best WordPress Plugin for Content Curation
There are plenty of excellent WordPress plugins for your content curation needs. However, one plugin takes the cake and makes content curation easy to do – WP RSS Aggregator.
As the most comprehensive, and best looking, RSS feed solution for WordPress, WP RSS Aggregator makes importing, merging, and displaying RSS and Atom feeds on your website a cinch. If you are looking for an automatic way to offer your readers an extensive list of curated content from reputable websites, this free WordPress plugin is for you.
Look at what else WP RSS Aggregator has to offer website owners:
- Easily add unlimited feed sources
- Limit lifetime of feed items stored in the database
- Use shortcodes to display feeds on your website
- Open YouTube, DailyMotion, or Vimeo directly
- Set date formats
- Choose whether to display feed sources
WP RSS Aggregator also offers website owners interested in content curation some exceptional premium add-ons to boost their content curation functionality.
Feed to Post
This add-on allows you to import feed items and store them as WordPress Posts, or any other custom post type you have. It can import full content from RSS feeds or provide a short excerpt. This add-on is perfect for websites that need continual content streaming in from external sources.
Full Text RSS Feeds
If you are looking to provide website visitors full content from an unlimited number of feed items per feed source, this is the add-on for you. Turning RSS feed excerpts into full-length posts, this add-on will only work in conjunction with the Feed to Post add-on.
WordAi
As another extension of the Feed to Post add-on, WordAi allows you to integrate the third-party Wordai.com service into Feed to Post. This, in turn, spins the imported content from external sources into unique and readable content.
SpinnerChief
Working together with the Feed to Post add-on, this add-on integrates the SpinnerChief article spinner into Feed to Post so, much like the WordAi add-on, the external content is turned into high quality and engaging content that differs from the imported content.
Keyword/Tag Filtering
Control, import, and store feed items or posts that contain specific keywords in either the title, content, or specific categories and tags. This helps to limit the type of content that imports onto your site and can be used alone or with any of the other WP RSS Aggregator add-ons.
Altogether, WP RSS Aggregator provides a multi-purpose solution for your content curation needs. Create a full-blown content curation website, or simply add some extra value to your readers by sharing popular content from similar established websites using this content curation and RSS feed aggregation plugin.
Top WordPress Curation Themes
If you are really looking to take your curation website to the next level, consider designing it with one of these popular WordPress curation themes. In addition to using WP RSS Aggregator, any one of these highly functioning curation themes will help you deliver a stand out website to your website visitors.
1. Plugin Hunt Theme
The Plugin Hunt Theme is perfect for those looking to create a website similar to the Product Hunt website. Displaying in a grid-like fashion for the ultimate content organization, you can have a curated content website up and running in minutes. Choose from classic or boxed layout options. Add sidebars with more information, or keep it simple and just offer content feeds. Lastly, keep your content fresh and up-to-date by displaying daily content near the top of the website.
More so, Plugin Hunt Theme now offers WooCommerce support for selling your products directly from your website. You can display familiar products, implement easy add to cart options, and take advantage of the re-designed WooCommerce dashboard. This feature makes curating relevant content and selling your products a win-win situation.
Here are more great features you can expect from the Plugin Hunt Theme:
- Advanced commenting system for increased reader engagement
- Front-end curation capability so readers can submit content as well
- Content collection so readers can save their favorite posts to view later
- Flash Post View so readers never leave the homepage
- Organize your best curated collections
PRICE – $79
Get Plugin Hunt Theme Here
2. Curated
Curated is brought to you as a modern magazine theme tailored to showcase all of your best curated content. With the advanced Moz-Slider built into the theme package, every site visitor easily sees all of your best stories. In addition, Curated offers website owners a simple way to build a homepage with the Drag & Drop Page Builder.
Reach every site visitor regardless of device or screen size thanks to the ultra-responsive design with easy mobile navigation. Plus, choose from three post cover styles, parallax, boxed, or regular to make your website unique, and even add Google snippets for review.
More standard features of Curated include:
- Visually appealing review scores with unlimited review numbers
- Unlimited color options
- WooCommerce integration
- Fully translatable and compatible with WPML
- 5 custom widgets
PRICE – $55
Get Curated Here
3. Banzai
Banzai is the perfect WordPress curation theme designed for sharing viral content much like BuzzFeed and PlayBuzz! do. Bundled with everything you need to get your fun and playful viral website created, Banzai includes features like social sharing, quizzes, lists, polls, conversations, trending, and grids and lists.
Complete with the exclusive Banzai plugin, this unique curation theme allows your readers to interact with your content, submit their results, and share across multiple social media networks. For instance, the MashShare plugins lets users click a button and share results on over 40 different social media platforms. In addition, Banzai comes with the ConvertPlug plugin for capturing emails and building a bigger following. And, if that’s not enough, you can enable the Social locker forcing your site visitors to share on social media before enjoying the content.
Here are more awesome features Banzai provides website owners:
- BuddyPress compatible for creating a community website
- Exclusive Trending Page for the best curated content you can find
- Google AdSense ready
- Multiple page layouts
- Infinite or Classic pagination
PRICE – $35
Get Banzai Here
4. WP-Drudge
WP-Drudge is a Drudge Report style WordPress template making curation of popular posts, videos, and your own published content easy to display for site visitors. Website owners can add images and showcase featured content in any way they want. For example, choose from eight color settings, change fonts, configure page widths, and even adjust borders. In addition, change the link behavior to act the way you want and make sure your readers can access the curated content you want them to see.
Built for optimal SEO optimization, WP-Drudge generates page titles, uses exceptional markup, and allows you to add additional pages for extra search engine indexing. More so, your mobile readers can access your homepage easily without having to scroll, resize, or flip their devices to render the website correctly.
Here are some more great things included in WP-Drudge:
- Add multiple RSS or Atom feeds anywhere on your site
- Built-in advertising manager for generating income
- Drag & Drop page customization
- Easy-to-use commenting system
- Add short blurbs about curated content to entice readers
PRICE – $89
5. Aggregate
Aggregate is content centric and widget ready aggregation theme brought to you by the talented Elegant Themes team. For instance, it comes pre-packaged with cool new widgets such as the Recent Videos slider, Photostream, and Popular Posts. Plus, its clear and readable design makes it easy for your site visitors to get all of your breaking news in one convenient location. In addition, it comes with plenty of ad ready areas for boosting your income.
Built feature rich and mimicking a magazine theme layout, Aggregate offers website owners plenty of features for designing the perfect layout. For example, easily create galleries, contact pages, sitemaps, blog feeds and more with the included Elegant Themes templates. More so, utilize the color control panel for an unlimited combination of custom colors, fonts and backgrounds.
Look here for some more standard features included in Aggregate:
- Cross browser compatibility
- Body and header font customizer
- Translation ready
- CSS media queries triggering layout sets for different screen sizes
- Library of shortcodes
PRICE – $89
Get Aggregate Here
6. Entrance
Entrance is the perfect curation theme for news, magazine, photography, and blogging websites. Boasting a clean and minimal design, this theme allows for organized content block creation using the drag & drop content builder. Choose from four blog layout options – Small Thumbnails, Large Thumbnails, Grid, or Masonry – and add any number of built-in custom widgets for things such as advertisement, social media connections, and reviews.
To make things more interesting, Entrance allows for multiple sidebar layouts, and can even customize a different layout for each page or post. In addition, brand your website to match your own personal color scheme, or color code news categories for easier navigation and reading. In the end, this simple theme makes creating a news curation site a piece of cake.
Here are additional features that come with Entrance:
- Review system for ratings and reviews
- WPML compatibility
- Real-time customizer with convenient preview option
- Responsive and retina ready
- Flex Slider for featured posts
PRICE – $49
7. Pinstagram
Pinstagram is a unique curation theme in that it is a Pinterest-inspired WordPress theme featuring the trademark grid layout with multiple post sizes and a long list of posts. Customizing the vital areas of your website is possible using this theme. For instance, amplify your social media presence by placing social share buttons anywhere on your site; without the need for a separate plugin. In addition, you can use an unlimited amount of backgrounds so you are free to change the overall look of your website without having to make multiple choices.
Test your ad positions until your find the spot that reels in the most clicks. Better yet, increase your site’s readability by including any number of built-in icons to attract attention to your most important stories. Lastly, take advantage of the built-in schema for getting found in search results.
Check out some other cool features Pinstagram offers:
- Plenty of additional shortcodes
- Custom widgets
- Google Fonts ready
- Featured lightbox
- 24 possible site layouts
PRICE – $59
Final Thoughts
Between all of the posts, articles, videos, and music available on the internet today, there is more information than the average person can handle at once. Except, they want to try.
Curating content is a great way to make the process of consuming the right information easier on your site visitors. By offering organized information that is relevant to a specific niche or industry, your readers no longer have to scan the internet, filter out poor search results, or become frustrated with the lack of valuable content.
If you are looking to turn your WordPress website into a curation machine, start using the WP RSS Aggregator plugin today and add a curation-based theme to make it look professional and reputable. Before you know it, loads of traffic will start visiting your website in search of the best content available.
Have you ever used the WP RSS Aggregator plugin to build a curation website? What about a WordPress curation theme? I would love to hear all about it in the comments below!
20 Responses
Please reconsider your recommendation of WP-Drudge. If nothing else, your recommendation is making you look bad. The reason for this is because it looks like their business is a scam. Go to their site and look at their forum, where many of their customers have failed to receive their download links for products they bought and furthermore are not receiving responses about this issue. This happened to me too. Regarding their product, I only know what you have said and what they say in their advertising.
Thanks, Lindsay for the collection!
If you don’t mind, I would like to suggest our new content curation theme called Eposo WordPress Theme
I hope this will add some value to this page.
Hello Lindsay
Thanks a lot for the useful list and overview.I have a question – do these themes allow multiauthors for content curation out of the box or this can be achieved by modules?Another query is regarding multiblogs – is it feasible to combine content curation with authors blogs?
Are you looking for the theme to allow a single post to have multiple authors? If so, this should be helpful to you: https://wpmayor.com/managing-a-multi-author-wordpress-blog/
Content curation can be applied on a site by itself or along with original content from other site authors. It’s totally up to you how you need to use it.
Great collection!
Since you’ve put together this list, we released our brand new WordPress theme for Content Curators called Chipmunk.
I hope someone here will find it useful!
Thanks for sharing, Piotr! Do you have any sites running the theme in different ways that we can check out?
Thanks for the info on content curating! I hope you can help me find another solution for content curation for which I can’t find anything yet. I would like to automatically load articles on my website from a certain keyword. But would like to review first en exclude some not very interesting articles before uploading. I haven’t found something that can do this. You usually can only exclude on keywords and not just one article. Do you know a plugin or so that can do this? Thanks!!
Hey Ellen,
WP RSS Aggregator can do that for you with the Feed to Post and Keyword Filtering add-ons.
You can import the posts into drafts based on certain keyword or phrase filters of your choice, then review those posts and only publish the ones you want.
You can even opt for out Advanced Feeds Bundle to combine our best 3 add-ons. That way, if your source’s RSS feed provides only excerpts of the original content, you can use our premium full text service with Feed to Post to bring in the entire original post.
https://www.wprssaggregator.com/pricing/
If you have any more questions just reach out here or via the chat/email options on our website. We’ll be more than happy to help 🙂
DO NOT BUY CURATION SUITE.
I made the mistake of purchasing this product only to find out I was not only misled but they do not answer ANY support tickets.
The features seem great on the top when you look at it but the moment you get inside you realize that the claim on their homepage “Unlimited Personal Site License” does not mean unlimited at all. You are very limited in the number of Keywords/Sites and everything else they can limit.
I would have been ok with this but nowhere on their site do they say this and its misleading.
Second, the Twitter trending does not work at all, even in their videos, you can plainly see that the amount of tweets a post has is 0, even on highly trending posts. They all show 0 tweets.
I submitted a ticket on this almost 2 weeks later 0 responses. I’ve emailed 3 times and submitted a ticket and even updated the ticket saying I will be canceling and still no response.
This is not a company that will support their product, they obviously do not care about giving any service.
To top if off there is no option in the back end to cancel. You will have to call your credit card company or cancel within PayPal which is what i did.
To sum it up:
Misleading
Does not work as advertised
No Support
No Cancellation option
I will make 1 prediction here though, I bet you they will respond here to try and save face. This is how companies work that don’t really care about customers but sure care about maintaining a good image so they can sucker people in for more sales.
Hey Troy, sorry to hear about your experience.
Have you tried WP RSS Aggregator as an alternate solution? If you have any questions you’d like answered about it feel free to reach out here or via our contact form:
https://www.wprssaggregator.com/contact/
Lindsay, do any of the themes above include a way for users/readers to register such as Flipboard?
I’ve not looked at every theme you listed–it’s possible one or two have this functionality.
Very useful and helpful article and nice post shared. I loved the content. Thanks for sharing such a nice post.
I’m considering going with an all-curated blog. Is there a free wp theme that would enable me to try curation on for size? I hate to invest in something I’m not sure I’ll use.
Hi Cathy,
Thanks so much for stopping by! I am excited that you want to try creating a curation blog and am with you on wanting to do so without spending money before diving in head first.
That said, I did some poking around (mind you I have not thoroughly checked it out), but here is what I found:
Curation – This is in the WordPress Repository so it is bound to be good. However, it is outdated so be mindful of that.
Unfortunately, all the other WordPress curation themes I came across were premium ones. However, this free one might give you a good enough idea about whether you want to move forward with a curation website or not.
I hope that helps!!
~ Lindsay 🙂
Hi Mike,
Thank you so much for updating me on the domain change. I will make sure this gets updated ASAP. In addition, thanks for sharing with our readers how to become an Epic Affiliate. I think a lot of people will want to jump onboard with that and help get your product noticed by their audiences, as well as make some money on the side. It’s a win-win for everyone!
~ Lindsay 🙂
Thanks for including Plugin Hunt Theme in here Lindsay.
A couple of things if you don’t mind me adding:-
1. The link should now be to:
(I’ve moved Themes to their own domain now)
2. Also, you could sign up as an Epic Affiliate here:
Hi Jigar Shah,
I am so pleased you found this roundup to be so exceptional. That has truly made my day because I am always aiming to help fellow WP Mayor readers.
You are right when you say that content curation is a powerful aspect in the digital marketing world. Curating quality content can have a tremendous impact on your website’s traffic and your site visitors’ opinion of you as an authority. Good luck if you choose to use the affordable Curated option.
Thanks so much for stopping by!
~ Lindsay 🙂
Content Curation is the most powerful aspect in the Digital Marketing World. Quality Content and Powerful Content Curation are the most necessary features for any brand.
Exclusive Seven Themes are looking amazing, but I think “Curated” looks best one among of them and it’s affordable too.
This is best collection of themes. I would like to thanks for the unique work. Thanks for awesome info.
Hi Simon,
Thanks for stopping by WP Mayor. I am so pleased this post about easy content curation has given you exactly what you need. Content curation can be such a wonderful feature on your website that your readers come to know, expect, and love. Good luck with your own content creation, I hope some of the options I provided will work for you!
~ Lindsay 🙂
Content curation made easy!! I was also looking forward to get to know to how share the content in more flexible way and this post was exactly what I needed, thumbs up!