Ever visit a website and love the layout and look and want to know which WordPress theme they are using? Great, because here’s a few quick and easy ways to find out their currently active theme.
There’s three basic ways to identify the WordPress theme a site is using.
- The manual way
- The Automated way
- The browser plugin way
First things first, once you find the theme in use, you may notice some sites also run Child themes.
What is a Child Theme?
A Child theme is basically the extension of a regular full fledged theme. A child theme uses the main theme as a framework. Importing the functions and design elements.
This way you can customize any theme, without breaking your site when the theme has an update simply by utilizing the Child Theme.
You already know how important it is to always keeo your themes up to date.
I’ll write a much more detailed article in the near future about Child themes, their use and why they make sense for custom websites.
Manually Identifying A WordPress Websites Theme
This is very simple and only takes a few clicks or keystrokes.
- Go to any website running WordPress
- Press Ctrl+u on your keyboard (or right click and select view source) *
- Press Ctrl+f and theme “themes”
- In 95% of websites you should go to some code that looks similar to this
/wp-content/themes/THEMENAME/
Where THEMENAME is above will show you the name of the theme.
How To Get More Details About The Theme?
Again, this is going to work 95% of the time.
On the website you want to know the details of the theme, open a new tab (ctrl+t in chrome/firefox) enter the URL of the site then append
/wp-content/themes/THEMENAME/style.css
Example: https://www.siteyouarevisting.com/wp-content/themes/THEMENAME/style.css
The style.css (again in 95% of themes) is where the details of the theme are stored. You should get a text page with the Theme Name, Theme URL, Version, Author, Author url and many times a nice description of the theme.
Success! You’ve manually found the theme, and I bet you learned a few keyboard shortcuts along the way!
How To Use Online Tools to Find a Websites Theme
There’s ton’s of tools out there to do this, of course we think our Free WordPress Theme, Plugin and Security Scanner is the best.
Buuuut, we might be a little biased, so we’ll point you to a few others as well to make your own conclusion 😊.
- WordPress Theme Detector (incase you missed the link 2 sentences up)
- ScanWP.net
- Wp-Detector.com
- isitwp.com
Any of these scans will be just about as accurate as manually checking the current theme being used.
Basically, it’s an automated/programmatic way of what we showed in how to manually find the Theme and Version.
Using a Browser Plugin To Identify The WordPress Theme
We don’t currently have a Browser plugin at wpsafescan so we can’t shamelessly plug our own, however, there’s a few decent choices out there for browser extensions.
We’re also not huge fans of browser extensions. Too many tend to want way too much access to your computer and online accounts for us to feel comfortable.
But, if you insist on using a Browser extension, do us one favor, READ the popup after you click install to see what information the extension wants.
Since these plugins work by viewing the source code of the page you’re going to see: “read and change all your data on the websites you visit”.
I encourage anyone to NOT use any extension that does this unless you plan on disabling it when you are not using it.
Definitely don’t install one that says this:
Manage my apps, extensions and themes? Pass.
I won’t make any recommendations on browser extensions.
I encourage you to use either the manual method or the Automated method by going to a website (ours?) and using the free scanner.
…In Conclusion
So there you go, three easy (ok two recommended) ways to Manually and Automatically identify the Theme and Version any WordPress Website is using.