How to find out what WordPress theme a site is using

You found a WordPress site you like and you want to know exactly how it was built: the theme, the page builder, the plugins, even the host. The good news is that WordPress sites broadcast most of that information in their public source code. You just need to know where to look, or point a scanner at the URL and let it read the signals for you.

Below are five ways to identify a WordPress theme, ordered from fastest to most manual. The first one takes about five seconds.

1. Use a WordPress theme detector

A theme detector fetches the page, parses the rendered HTML, and reports back the theme name, version, author, and whether it is a classic or block (FSE) theme. Our scanner goes further: it resolves child and parent themes, lists the active plugins it can see, identifies the hosting provider, and runs an AI design audit. Everything it reports traces back to a real signal in the page, which you can verify yourself using the manual methods below.

This is the right approach when you want a complete picture in one shot, or when the site has done a little work to hide its theme. Browse the most-detected themes across our scan index to see what the rest of the web is running.

2. Read the page source for the theme folder

Every classic WordPress theme loads its stylesheet and assets from a predictable path: /wp-content/themes/THEME-SLUG/. To find it, open the site, right-click, choose View Page Source (or press Ctrl+U), then use Ctrl+F to search the source for wp-content/themes/. The folder name that follows is the theme slug. If you see something like /wp-content/themes/astra/style.css, the site is running Astra.

One catch: the slug is the folder name, not always the marketing name. A folder called generatepress_child tells you the site uses a child theme built on GeneratePress.

3. Open the theme's style.css header

Once you have the theme folder, open its stylesheet directly in your browser, for example https://example.com/wp-content/themes/astra/style.css. WordPress themes are required to declare a header block at the top of style.css with the theme name, version, author, and theme URI. That header is the authoritative source for the theme's real name, which is exactly what our scanner reads when it reports a theme.

4. Check the generator meta tag and devtools

Many WordPress sites include a <meta name="generator" content="WordPress 6.x"> tag, and page builders like Elementor and Divi add their own generator tags too. In the page source, search for generator to confirm the platform and version. You can also open your browser's developer tools (F12), go to the Network tab, reload the page, and watch which stylesheet and script URLs load. The /wp-content/themes/ and /wp-content/plugins/ paths that appear tell you the theme and many of the plugins at once.

5. When a site hides its theme

Some sites strip the generator tag, rename theme folders, or serve a heavily cached front end that obscures the usual signals. Full Site Editing (block) themes and custom-built themes can also be harder to read, because the giveaway folder name might just be a generic project name. This is where a scanner earns its keep: it combines several signals at once, asset paths, the REST API namespace at /wp-json/, HTML fingerprints, and sitemap hints, so it can still identify the stack when any single clue is missing. If a theme genuinely looks custom-built, our tool flags it as such, which is itself useful intelligence.

How to check if a website is built on WordPress at all

Before you can find the theme, it helps to confirm the site is even WordPress. The quickest tells:

• The source contains /wp-content/, /wp-includes/, or a /wp-json/ REST API endpoint.
• There is a login page at /wp-login.php or /wp-admin/.
• The generator meta tag names WordPress, or you can reach /wp-sitemap.xml.

Our scanner checks all of these and returns a clear yes or no, so you are not guessing. If the site is not WordPress, it will tell you what platform it likely is instead.

What to do once you know the theme

Identifying the theme is usually step one toward a bigger goal. If you want to use the same theme, head to the theme's page on our index to see its live usage data and grab the official download or upgrade link. If you want a site that looks like the one you scanned but is built better and faster, that is a rebuild, and we cover the right way to do that in how to clone a WordPress site design.