How to Find the WordPress Theme a Site is Using

Finding the right WordPress theme for your new website can be challenging, which is why people often look to other sites for inspiration. After searching for a while, you may find a site that’s perfect for your needs. But before you start planning how to add your own content and tweak the layout, you need to find out how the site was built. Given the massive popularity of WordPress, it’s highly likely that the site you like was built on WordPress. Most WordPress sites rely on a theme – and in this article, we’ll show you how to find which WordPress theme a site is using.

How to Find the Name of the WordPress Theme a Site is Using

The first thing you should do when examining a site is to check its footer for clues about the theme name or author. Theme authors will sometimes include copyright code in the footer to mark their brand. As most WordPress users tend to buy themes with pre-built content, the same code might still be present on the site. This happens rarely since pre-built content is swiftly edited to fit the needs of the site’s owner, but it’s always worth a shot.

If you had no luck finding the theme or author name in the footer, don’t give up just yet. You can try one of the following methods to figure out which theme you’re dealing with.

Theme-Checking Websites

Since WordPress is a widely used platform for site creation, it is highly likely this site was created on WordPress. There are several websites designed to check if a site runs on WordPress. You can also employ them to find out which theme (and plugins) it’s using. Some of the more popular theme-checking sites are What theme is that, Scan WP, Is it WP, and WP theme detector. All of them are very user-friendly. Now we’ll show you how they work – we’ll use What theme is that as an example.

First, enter the site’s URL and click on the Search button.

The search might take some time so be patient until you see the results appear below. They will contain information on whether the site is using WordPress, what WordPress theme it’s built with, and which plugins are activated on it. This information will be displayed in sections.

How to Check the Name of the WordPress Theme Manually

You can manually check which theme a site is using. There are two ways to do this—via Inspect or via View page source.

Open the site in your browser (we used Google Chrome), right-click anywhere on the page and choose Inspect from the dropdown menu. This will open the developer tools.

Click on the Sources tab and, in the menu on the left, locate the wp-content directory. Open it to find the themes directory that contains the theme name. You can go one step further and locate the style.css file. By inspecting the style.css file, you can discover relevant information about the theme including its name and URL, the author, and description. The style.css is located inside the theme directory, so the path will be wp-content/themes/theme_name/style.css. Clicking on the file will open it in the central section of the developer tools with the information displayed near the top.

There’s another way to find the theme name manually – simply access the style.css file and examine it. Open the site in a browser once more, right-click anywhere on the page and press the View page source option.

This will open a new tab showing all the HTML code, as well as scripts and stylesheets that are loaded for that page. Search the code for style.css. You can do this by looking through the code or by searching for the file name (which is much quicker and easier). Just press CTRL and F on your keyboard to open page search and then type in style.css. If the result contains several matches, find the one containing the href attribute (as shown on the screenshot) and click on it.

This will open the style.css file in a separate tab, showing you the relevant information in the top section of the document.

Finding the Theme Online

When you find the theme name and the theme and author URL from the style.css file, you can use the links to take you to the theme. In case you only have a theme’s name without URLs, you can Google it. Alternatively, look for the theme in WordPress marketplaces like ThemeForest. After locating the theme, it’s always a good idea to investigate a bit (e.g. date of the last update) and check the author’s credibility before you download/purchase and install the theme on your server.

Final Thoughts

If you followed our tips and couldn’t find the theme’s name, it’s most likely that the site has a custom-made theme. In that case, you can ask the site’s owner directly. Try sending them an email or messaging them on one of their social media accounts.

Ultimately, we hope this tutorial will be helpful for trying to find which theme a WordPress site is using and when creating your own amazing website. Feel free to bookmark or save this page so you can refer back to these tips in case you need them again.