Everyone who’s designed a site knows that much of it is inspiration from others. Whether its color combinations, dimensions, sidebars, or navigation, it’s impossible to not take tips from everyone else. Once you have your own site, you’ll constantly be on the lookout for new things to add to your own. It’s as if a switch goes off in your head that’s always asking the question “Will this look good on my site?”.
The first step to figuring out how you can achieve the same look and feel of a WordPress site is to know which theme they’ve used. Once you have that, most of the work is done. The following customizations will help you distinguish your site from others, but the basic framework is in place.
Luckily, finding out the name of the theme is a relatively simple process. However, keep in mind that many custom themes are not directly available for download or sale. Especially for large sites that spend a lot of money to make extensive changes to the default theme. So while you may get the base theme, it could take a lot of work to replicate another.
So let’s see how to go about it.
Step 1: Get the Theme Slug Name
Open the site you want and go to the source code (Ctrl+u on Chrome and Firefox). Then search for the following string:
wp-content/themes
You should get a lot of results like this:
Look at the string immediately after “/themes/”. That’s the slug of the theme. In most cases, it should be enough to get you the theme name since the slug is often just a simplified version of the theme. But not always.
In the example above, the theme slug is “mpr-ms3”.
Step 2: Get the Full Path Name
Also, get the full path name to the slug. In most cases, it’ll simply be:
sitename.com/wp-content/themes/slug
However, sometimes people install WordPress in a directory, and don’t use the directory name in the public site name. So you might have something like this:
sitename.com/[someotherdirectory]/wp-content/themes/[slug]
Make a note of the full site
Dealing with Caching and Combination Plugins
Many sites use plugins to merge all their CSS together. In which case, you may not find any references to “wp-content/themes” since they’ll be combined into one single file with a numbered name.
To get around this, search for “.css” files instead. You should only get a few. Open each of them individually, and then search for “wp-content/themes”. You should get a hit in one of them, and be able to extract the theme slug as for this website:
In the example above, the site had three “.css” files, and one of them gave me the slug name “mocha”.
Step 3: Viewing “style.css” with the Slug
Once you have the slug, construct the following URL:
sitename/[path-to-slug]/[slug]/style.css
Replace [slug] with the slug name you got in step 1, and replace [path-to-slug] with the path name you got in step 2.
This is the site’s “style.css” file, and it looks something like this:
This will contain the WordPress theme name, as well as the URL for that theme so you know where to find or buy it yourself! And that’s it!
Why Not Search Directly for style.css?
Some of you might be wondering why we didn’t search the site for “style.css” from the beginning? The reason is that there are many plugins and assets that have the filename “style.css”. And as we saw above, certain minification and combination plugins hide it from plain view. So we need to construct the URL to style.css manually, and it isn’t always straightforward.
I hope this quick guide was useful, and allowed you to find the theme name of the site you want to get inspiration from!
I’m a NameHero team member, and an expert on WordPress and web hosting. I’ve been in this industry since 2008. I’ve also developed apps on Android and have written extensive tutorials on managing Linux servers. You can contact me on my website WP-Tweaks.com!
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