Someone asked the following question on the GenesisWP Facebook group.
Is it possible to find out the theme name and company selling it when you come across a WordPress website you like? Can you inspect the code to get this information, or what is the best way to do this? Thanks.
Before we get started, I do want to note that we can’t assume that a WordPress site is using a publicly available theme. If it is, we can’t assume that the theme is paid.
While I would educatedly guess that the vast majority of WordPress sites use publicly available themes, many sites use themes custom developed by an agency or in-house team, and are not available for purchase or download.
The techniques described in the article below may still give you a clue on who created the theme, but there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to acquire it.
Check the footer
Most publicly-available themes will include a footer credit. Just scroll to the bottom of a WordPress site and try to find anything that looks like this.
However, footer credits tend to be one of the first things WordPress website operators remove. While this may be the easiest way to identify a theme, it is not the most reliable.
Use a “theme detector” website
If you search “WordPress theme detector” you will find a bunch of sites like WPThemeDetector, that offer the ability to “detect” what theme a WordPress site is using if you type in its URL.
Here, we can see the theme screenshot, the theme version number, the theme author, the theme description, the licensing information, the theme tags, and a link to find out even more about the theme.
You might be wondering how any rando can type in your website URL into WPThemeDetector, click the “Experience the magic of WPTD!” button, and have information about your active theme barfed out onto the page.
However, the “magic” can be replicated with basic knowledge of how WordPress themes work and ability to read HTML code.
View the source
On a laptop or desktop computer, right click on and click the option for “View Page Source” (may differ depending on which browser you’re using).
Do a text search for the following: https://ownyourplatform.com/wp-content/themes/ (replacing ownyourplatform.com with whatever the site URL is) and see what comes up.
We’re looking for the theme slug, which what immediately proceeds /themes/ and precedes anything that comes after the next backslash.
For example, if you see a reference to https://ownyourplatform.comlenscap/style.css then “lenscap” would be the theme slug.
Once we know that, we can find out a lot of information just by typing the following URLs into your browser address bar:
https://ownyourplatform.com/wp-content/themes/lenscap/style.css: The stylesheet header can include information like the theme name and author. This file is required for a WordPress theme to function.https://ownyourplatform.com: This may be a screenshot of the theme in action. Could also be in .gif or .jpg extensions.https://ownyourplatform.com: This may be a file with additional information about the theme. Could also be in .md extension.
Please note that style.css is the only file you can count on being there. While screenshots and readmes are commonly included in WordPress themes, they're not sure things.
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