What WordPress Theme Is That? Detectors That Still Work
Paste the site’s URL into WPThemeDetector. It is free, needs no account, and reports the theme, its parent and child, and the plugins it can see. If it comes back empty, try Scan WP, then Satori Studio’s detector. If all three draw a blank, the site is caching or stripping the clues, and the manual check below will usually still find it.
That is the whole answer. The rest of this page covers how the detection works, why it fails, and why the “most popular theme” league tables these tools publish should not be trusted.
The 30-second manual check
No tool required, and it works when tools fail. Open the page, view source, and search the HTML for/wp-content/themes/. The folder name that follows is the active theme, so /wp-content/themes/astra/style.css means Astra. If you see two different folder names, the second one is usually a child theme sitting on top of a parent.
Then open that stylesheet directly: example.com/wp-content/themes/astra/style.css. WordPress requires a comment block at the top with the theme name, version, author, author URI and licence, so you get everything a detector would have told you, straight from the source.
Two other places worth a look in the same source view. Search for /wp-content/plugins/ to see which plugins are loading assets on that page, and check the <meta name="generator"> tag, which sometimes still carries the WordPress version.
The detectors that work
WPThemeDetector
Start here. WPThemeDetector is free, has no scan limits worth worrying about, and gives the fullest read of the three: the theme, the parent and child relationship, and the plugins it can detect. It also publishes Top Themes, Top Theme Providers and Top Plugins reports drawn from its own scans. The site funds itself with affiliate links, which it discloses. In our checks it was the one most likely to name a theme that had been renamed or customised, where the others stopped at “this is WordPress”.Scan WP
Scan WP is the most generous on usage. Its own terms are explicit: “Scan WP is free for all users to use… There are no limitations on use either, you can scan as many websites as you want to.” No sign-up either. It goes a step further than the others by trying to identify the host as well as the theme and plugins, which is handy if you are benchmarking a competitor’s stack rather than just admiring their design. It reports theme pricing, version and vendor, and maintains Top 50 theme and plugin lists. It carries an affiliate disclosure too.Satori Studio
Satori Studio’s detector is the plainest of the three and useful as a second opinion. Paste a URL, press the button, and it returns the theme, the child theme where there is one, and any plugins it can pick up. It is currently at version 1.6, which expanded the range of minification plugins it can see through. It is also the most honest about its limits, warning up front that it will not work on sites using aggressive caching, custom setups or stripped-down code, or on sites deliberately hiding the information. IsItWP is worth a fourth try if the others fail. It describes itself as a free scanner that tells you whether a site runs WordPress and reports the theme, plugins and hosting. We could load the form but could not confirm the depth of its results, so treat it as a tiebreaker rather than a first stop.What happened to “What WordPress Theme Is That”
The tool this page was originally about, What WordPress Theme Is That, is still online and the search box still loads. Its data is not maintained. Its Top Theme Providers report carries the line “Statistics generated on Mon Nov 9 18:24:36 2020”, and the footer copyright reads 2011 to 2016. So you can still run a lookup, but do not cite its rankings, and do not assume a blank result means the site is not WordPress. One of the three tools above will generally do better.Why old detector rankings mislead
Every detector publishes a “most popular themes and providers” table, and those tables get copied into articles and then left there for years. Two examples of what that does. The frozen 2020 snapshot on What WordPress Theme Is That still lists WooThemes as a top-ten theme provider. WooThemes as a theme brand effectively stopped being a destination in July 2016, when woothemes.com was redirected to woocommerce.com. Mark Forrester explained the move at the time: “We’ve moved our site over from WooThemes.com to WooCommerce.com to provide focus for our team, clarity for our customers, and to reflect what has become Woo’s core business.” The themes continued, under WooCommerce branding. Old plugin tables have the same problem in reverse: they list Visual Composer as though it were one product. The WordPress page builder plugin sold under that name was renamed WPBakery Page Builder from October 2017. Visual Composer Website Builder now exists as a separate product from the same company, and WPBakery’s own documentation stresses that the two “are both independent products” that “can’t be simply replaced one by another”. A detector reporting “Visual Composer” on a 2018 scan and a detector reporting it today may be describing different software. The lesson is narrow but useful: use these tools to identify one specific site, which is what they are good at. Do not use their aggregate tables as market data.Why detection fails
When a detector returns nothing but “this site uses WordPress”, it is usually one of these:- A custom or proprietary theme. Nothing to look up, because it was never sold. You will still see the folder name in the source, which is often the client or agency name.
- A renamed theme folder. Some agencies rename the directory and rewrite the style.css header. The theme is a commercial one, but the fingerprints are gone.
- Aggressive caching, minification or bundling. If CSS and JS are concatenated and served from a CDN path, the
/wp-content/themes/giveaway disappears from the HTML. - Deliberate hardening. Security plugins strip the generator tag, hide version strings and can rewrite asset paths specifically to defeat this kind of fingerprinting.
- Headless WordPress. If the front end is a separate application talking to WordPress over the REST API, there is no WordPress theme to find.
