Aurora ships with 13 archive layouts. Archives are the pages where readers browse your posts by category, tag, date, or author. As your blog grows, archives drive significant traffic, and the layout you pick shapes whether those pages feel inviting or read like a wall of titles. If you haven’t settled on a homepage layout yet either, our homepage layouts comparison covers that decision alongside this one.
The archive wrapper
All Aurora archives use the same wrapper class, .posts-card. The layout choice changes how the cards inside that wrapper are styled and arranged, not the underlying structure.
The layouts
Default
A standard grid of post cards with featured images, titles, excerpts, dates, and categories. Masonry-compatible.
This is the reliable choice for most blogs that don’t have a strong reason to pick something more specialized.
Cards
A variation of the grid with more emphasis on the card aesthetic, using strong borders or shadows and distinct card boundaries. Masonry-compatible.
Works well when each post should feel like its own distinct unit rather than blending into a continuous feed.
Masonry (within other layouts)
A Pinterest-style irregular grid where cards have variable heights. This is available as an option on compatible layouts (Board, Cards, Default, Detailed, Minimal, Overlay) rather than being a standalone layout of its own.
Best for image-heavy blogs where featured images naturally vary in aspect ratio.
List
A vertical list of posts, where each post is a horizontal block with the image and text side by side.
It’s compact and shows more posts per scroll than grid layouts do.
Best for: text-heavy blogs, essay archives, and blogs where titles and excerpts matter more than visual hierarchy.
Magazine
A multi-row magazine-style layout where featured posts get more space and smaller posts populate around them.
Best for: blogs that want editorial hierarchy in their archives instead of a purely chronological flow.
Board
A board-style layout similar to Pinterest boards. Masonry-compatible.
Best for: visual or inspiration-driven blogs.
Detailed
A card layout with more metadata visible per post, including longer excerpts, more category info, dates, and read time. Masonry-compatible.
Best for: content-rich blogs where readers benefit from seeing more about each post before they click through.
Minimal
A stripped-down archive with minimal styling, often just showing the title, date, and a brief excerpt. It’s masonry-compatible in theory, though pairing minimal styling with masonry is uncommon in practice.
Best for: text-focused, editorial blogs.
Overlay
Cards with text overlaid on the featured image, where the image serves as the background and the title and metadata sit on top of it. Masonry-compatible.
Best for: visual blogs like photography, design, or food, where the image itself is the primary draw.
Swapped
A layout with a hardcoded dark background block (#191919 with #f5f5f5 text) for the text section.
This is one of Aurora’s two hard-coded color exceptions, so keep it in mind if you’re theming the rest of the site around a specific palette.
Best for: bloggers who want a deliberate dark-text-block aesthetic rather than a fully customizable one.
Broad
A wide-format archive with larger post cards, where each card takes up more horizontal space.
It uses white text on a banner overlay, which is one of the rare hardcoded color elements outside of Swapped.
Best for: featured-style archives where each post deserves more visual weight than a standard grid gives it.
Other variants
The full set includes additional layouts that mix elements of the ones above. Browse them directly in the Customizer to see all the options with live preview, since screenshots alone don’t always capture the subtler differences.
Masonry as a feature
Masonry mode creates an irregular grid where cards have variable heights based on their content, giving the archive a Pinterest-like feel.
It’s available on Board, Cards, Default, Detailed, Minimal, and Overlay.
It works best for blogs where featured images vary in aspect ratio. Forced-square or uniform-height grids tend to make varied images look awkward or cropped strangely, while masonry embraces that variation instead of fighting it.
Featured image fallback
Many Aurora archive layouts use --link-color as a fallback for posts without featured images, so empty image areas get a solid color block rather than blank space.
In practice, this means that if some of your older posts lack featured images, the archive still looks intentional rather than broken. The fallback block uses your existing color settings instead of showing a visible gap where an image should be.
Choosing based on what you publish
Text-heavy / essay blogs
List, Minimal, or Magazine. These surface titles and excerpts clearly and treat images as secondary.
Image-driven blogs (food, photography, design, fashion)
Masonry mode on Board, Cards, or Overlay. Let the images carry the archive rather than competing with dense text.
News / current events
Magazine or Detailed. Both fit multiple posts per row with metadata visible at a glance.
Tutorial / educational
Default or Cards. Clear titles and excerpts, without being too image-heavy for content that’s meant to be scanned for information.
Portfolio-style blogs
Board, Overlay, or Broad. All three are image-forward and grid-based.
Configuring archive options
Go to Customize, then Posts, then Archive Style, to pick the layout. Within each one, additional options typically include posts per page, show or hide excerpts, show or hide dates, show or hide categories on cards, enabling masonry where it’s supported, and enabling Ajax load-more. Aurora’s archive settings documentation covers each of these in detail, and the how to switch archive layouts guide walks through the actual switching process step by step.
Ajax load-more
Aurora supports Ajax load-more on archives, so visitors can click a button to load more posts inline without a page reload.
The upside is that it keeps readers on the archive page longer and tends to produce better engagement signals. The downside is a small amount of added JavaScript overhead, which is generally a worthwhile tradeoff for most blogs.
Pagination vs load-more vs infinite scroll
Aurora supports three approaches to paging through archives: standard pagination with page 1, 2, 3 links at the bottom; Ajax load-more, where visitors click a button to append more posts; and infinite scroll, which loads automatically as the reader scrolls (available on some layouts).
Load-more is generally the better recommendation. Research from the Baymard Institute has found that “load more” buttons tend to outperform both pure infinite scroll and traditional pagination for usability, since infinite scroll can make it difficult for readers to backtrack to something they already saw, and pure pagination adds friction that discourages readers from going deeper into your archive.
Category vs tag vs date archives
The same archive layout applies to category, tag, date, author, and search-results archives by default.
Aurora doesn’t ship with separate layouts per archive type out of the box. If you want a different layout for, say, a photography portfolio category versus your main blog category, you’d need custom code or a child theme to make that distinction. Our guide on setting up a WordPress child theme is a reasonable starting point if you go that route.
Mobile experience
All archive layouts collapse to a single column on mobile. Multi-column grids stack vertically, and masonry becomes a single column as well.
Test on mobile to verify the layout still works well in that constrained format. Some image-heavy layouts feel noticeably different on phones than they do on a wide desktop screen, and since Google’s indexing is mobile-first, that’s ultimately the version of your archive that matters most for how the page ranks.
Making the choice
Aurora’s 13 archive layouts cover everything from minimal lists to image-heavy masonry grids. Default, Cards, and List are the safe starting points for most blogs. Masonry mode, on the layouts that support it, suits image-driven blogs particularly well, while Magazine and Detailed suit content-rich blogs that want more editorial structure. Swapped and Broad carry hardcoded color elements, while everything else follows your color settings without restriction. Pick based on what you actually publish, and don’t be afraid to switch as your content evolves over time.
