Have you ever found a WordPress site’s design so attractive that you’d want it for your own site? There are tons of great WordPress themes out there to use as inspiration. Thankfully, if you’re ever curious about which theme a WordPress site is running, one of these WordPress theme detectors can help you out.
Perhaps you happen to be a WordPress enthusiast who’s seeking to discover new stuff about your favorite CMS. Alternatively, maybe you simply want to prove to yourself or somebody else that you were able to correctly guess what WordPress theme a particular website was built with.
Whatever your reasons are, the truth is that you can easily find out the details of a website design through awesome WordPress theme detectors – even if you don’t know any code.
Quick summary: If you want the most detailed results, start with What Theme or WP Theme Detector. If you also want plugin detection and extra site insights, ScanWP is a solid option. And if you’d rather detect themes without leaving the page you’re browsing, try the WordPress Theme and Plugins Detector browser extension.
Top 6 WordPress Theme Detectors Compared
Before talking about each tool separately, we made a short comparison to test how many themes were uncovered by the WP detectors on our list. We tested the six tools on five different sites to see if they worked properly.
Here are the sites we used as guinea pigs for this experiment and the WordPress themes they actually use:
| Academy of Self Defense | Reader’s Digest | Jacob McMillen | Brian Smith Photography | Share America |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ShopIsle Pro | Bumblebee | Divi | Astra | Newspaper child theme |
And here’s how the detectors performed:
| Tool | Academy of Self Defense | Reader’s Digest | Jacob McMillen | Brian Smith Photography | Share America |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| What Theme | Detected | Detected | Detected | Detected | Detected (parent + child) |
| WordPress Theme Detector | Detected | Detected | Detected | Detected | Detected (parent only) |
| What WordPress Theme Is That | Detected | Detected | Detected | Detected | Detected (parent only) |
| WP Theme Detector | Detected | Detected | Detected | Detected | Detected (parent + child) |
| ScanWP | Detected | Detected | Detected | Detected | Detected (parent only) |
| WordPress Theme and Plugins Detector | Detected | Detected | Detected | Detected | Detected (parent only) |
The Best 6 WordPress Theme Detectors in Detail
Now, let’s get to know the candidates from the table better. We’ll talk about each of them in detail and see what they come with. What’s cool is that a lot of these theme detectors go beyond just WordPress themes and provide some other neat information.
What Theme
What Theme is a great online tool that not only detects a WordPress site’s theme, but also shows useful details about the theme such as its main URL, the author, what version and license it has, tags related to its purpose, and a description. Apart from WordPress, you can also use it for Drupal, Shopify, and many others.
What’s interesting about this tool is that it recognizes custom and child themes immediately and delivers you the author/agency that built them. You can also use What Theme if you want to find out whether a site uses WordPress or not. It’s arguably one of the most thorough WordPress theme detectors available.
WordPress Theme Detector
Second on our list of the best WP theme detectors is Satori Studio’s WordPress Theme Detector, which is a simple platform that comes with a neat and minimalistic layout.
The tool gets straight to business right on its homepage. On the left side of your screen, you’ll see a URL field plus a button labeled What WordPress Theme is That.
This is where you’ll enter the website domain you’re curious about, before hitting the button to run the WordPress theme analysis. You’ll then have the results in about two to five seconds, and they’ll be displayed on the adjacent right-hand panel. It’s that simple and straightforward.
As for the resulting report, the WordPress Theme Detector has been built by Satori Studio to provide the most basic details about each theme. You’ll learn not only the name of the site’s WordPress theme, but also its author, version, and link to its official distribution homepage.
But, that’s not all. To provide even more clarity, this WordPress theme detector includes a brief description of each theme.
So far, the tool has maintained 100% accuracy in our tests on WordPress websites. We noticed that it’s even capable of pulling information from sites with heavily minimized code. The only test subject that might give you a little bit of trouble here is a website riding on an extensively customized theme.
What WordPress Theme Is That
This is a similar online tool made to detect what WordPress theme a certain site is using. Just go to the tool’s page and enter the URL of the site that you want to check in the search bar.
What WordPress Theme Is That will not only detect the main theme, but also the parent (if any). It also goes beyond themes and presents you with a list of plugins that are being used by that given site. Unlike WhatTheme, this is just for WordPress, so it won’t detect themes built for other platforms.
WP Theme Detector
WPTD is a very cool theme detector, not only because it has a friendly interface, but also because of the way it presents the detected theme. The tool is based entirely online, so you need to just enter the URL of the site you’re interested in. To display the theme it found, WP Theme Detector provides nice slide-out sections that deliver helpful details about the author.
What info does this tool deliver exactly? The theme’s description, tag, license, a great box of statistics about the provider, additional information about the site you searched for, and a list of plugins that the tool was able to detect on the site. As an added bonus, the tool also detects child themes.
ScanWP
ScanWP is another web-based tool built to detect the theme and plugins that a WordPress site is using. Apart from the theme’s name, URL, and author, it provides additional information such as price, description, hosting provider, screenshot, and a list of plugins that are active on the site.
A particularly cool thing about ScanWP is that it showcases more examples of other websites that use the detected theme.
WordPress Theme and Plugins Detector
Last but not least, we have a WordPress theme detector that gets the job done while you surf the web.
WordPress Theme and Plugins Detector, as it’s called, operates a little bit differently from the other five WordPress theme detectors on our list. You see, while the rest are essentially web-based theme detectors, WTPD is a browser extension that detects both themes and plugins.
The tool offers installable browser extensions for multiple browsers. Each version binds to the extensions bar to provide page insights in real-time.
You don’t even need to tweak any settings after installation. WTPD activates itself automatically when you open a WordPress-based site. You’ll see its icon light up and when you click on it, it’ll display a pop-up that will show you the name and version of the WordPress theme, the development team behind it, as well as the WordPress plugins powering the live page.
The Winner?
Putting all the things together, the most effective tool that we found is a combination between WP Theme Detector and What Theme. Apart from detecting all the WordPress themes, they both offer a bunch of useful information about the searched item, including author details and a few plugins that are active on the site. They can also tell the difference between a child theme and the parent WP theme.
As an alternative, ScanWP knows its stuff very well and does specify the subject site’s WordPress theme plus a couple of its accompanying WP plugins.
Finally, if you’d want such details without switching tabs, the WordPress Theme and Plugins Detector is a browser extension that’s worth considering. A single click on its icon is all it takes to disclose the themes and plugins for any WordPress-based page you’re visiting. Its insights might not be as extensive as What Theme’s and WP Theme Detector’s, but they provide the parent theme information quite accurately.
Bonus WP theme detection methods
Quick steps: 1) Open the site’s page source. 2) Search for /wp-content/themes/. 3) If you find a theme folder name, inspect the related stylesheet or theme files for more details. 4) If the source is heavily customized or unclear, confirm your findings with one of the theme detectors above.
The developer method
I called this one the “developer method” because this is how developers investigate websites. For them, doing this is like copy and paste. But it’s not too complicated, so you can probably figure it out even if you’re not a developer.
This time you won’t need any tools, you just have to go to a website, right click on the page, and select View Page Source. Or you can simply press CTRL+U. The page’s code will appear in a new tab and all you have to do is search for “wp-content/themes” using CTRL+F. On many standard WordPress sites, you’ll find the theme folder name in lines that contain this exact phrase. That said, some sites hide, rewrite, or heavily customize this path, so this method won’t work every time.
WordPress theme name in the footer
This option is the simplest and quickest, but it’s not always going to be available. It depends on how the website you’re on was designed.
The idea behind this method is very straightforward though:
Some sites include footer credits that mention the platform and, occasionally, the theme they’re using. So, all you need to do is look at the footer. You can do that before resorting to one of the WordPress theme detectors from above, because the answer might be right in front of you.
So that’s it! We would now love to hear about your favorite method of detecting a WordPress theme. And, of course, if you know of other great solutions beyond these WordPress theme detectors, feel free to share them with us in the comments section.
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Thanks for the brilliant information!
Appreciate it to the max 🙂