When you’re building a website, making it look aesthetically pleasing can be challenging, especially if you’re not a web designer.
Fortunately, there is a large collection of free WordPress themes at your disposal. If you’re designing your website with only a vague idea of what a WordPress.com theme is, knowing which one to choose can feel overwhelming.
So, if there are some reference websites that you want to model your site after, find out which WordPress themes they use. Then, you can search through the WordPress.com theme library for similar ones. Here’s how to get started.z
The source code of a website is the HTML that makes it run on web browsers. For the most part, if a site is viewable on the internet, so is its source code.
To access a site’s source code, right-click on the page, and select the “View Page Source” option.
This is what you may see:
You don’t have to read all of this text it to determine what WordPress theme a site uses.
Hit “Command + F” or (“Control + F” on a PC), and type in “theme.”
As you can see, this website is using the Divi theme. (If the search doesn’t return any theme, it’s likely the site isn’t powered by WordPress.)
Even if you find the theme’s name, you’ll still want to double-check that the website runs on WordPress. To do this, you can search for the term “WordPress” or “wp-content” which often shows up in image source URLs that have been uploaded to a WordPress site’s content library.
It’s not as complicated as it sounds. Reading CSS is more straightforward than the option above.
After getting to the source code, hit “Command + F” and search for “style.css.”
If there is only one link with “style.css” in it, click it. If there are multiple links (like in the website above), click the one that is associated with a theme, and not one associated with a plugin or something else.
After you click through, you’ll see something like this:
Most of the time, this will provide every detail that you need.
From here, you can determine the theme name, the exact version being used, the company that makes the theme, and even the website where you can learn more about the theme or purchase it yourself.
If the first two options sound complicated and you don’t want to wade through source code and style sheets for information, plenty of companies make free tools that will do the searching for you.
There are a lot to choose from, and they all work similarly. Some of the most popular tools are WPThemeDetector, Scan WP, and What WordPress Theme Is That.
On these homepages, enter the URL of the page you want to know the theme of, then hit the search button:
If one tool doesn’t properly detect the theme, try another one.
Once you’ve found out what theme a website uses, you can search for it on the WordPress.com Theme Showcase. If you can’t find the desired theme there, you can browse through the wide selection of available themes, or become a WordPress.com Business user — this plan offers the freedom to upload any theme you’d like to use on your site.
With the right theme, everything about your online presence becomes more streamlined, including updating your website, publishing blog posts, and using your favorite plugins — all without needing to hire a web developer.
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