Clients have asked me in the past how they can style their website like another site in their industry. Although I believe themes like Divi can do a great job transforming into any style you are looking to achieve, some highly specialized themes can be a better choice if they have specific functionalists.

So how do we figure out what WordPress theme a site is using?

First, we want to make sure the site we are looking to emulate is a WordPress site. You can start by scrolling to the bottom of the site and check the footer section. A lot of WordPress sites will mention WordPress and the theme being used:

Another quick and simple way to check is to add “/wp-login.php” after the domain name. For example, if we were checking www.wordpress.org, we would try www.wordpress.org/wp-login.php

If we get a page like this:

Than we know it is a WordPress site. If not, you will most likely get a 404 or other error page.

Sometimes a double check is in order. There are plugins for WordPress that allow you to customize the login URL, meaning if a site has such a plugin installed, the /wp-login.php trick will not work and you will be redirected to the homepage or another page.

We can use a site like www.builtwith.com to dive even deeper into what technologies a site is using. What is great about BuiltWith is if the site you are looking up is not a WordPress site, you can see what other CMS or web technologies power that site.

You might have caught in the screenshot above that BuiltWith was actually able to detect what theme we are using here at Become Web Smart under “Frameworks”. If that is the case, then you can stop right here. But, I have noticed that BuiltWith does not always detect the theme. We have another awesome site in our arsenal though: WordPress Theme Detector.

Once we have identified that the site we are looking to emulate is in fact a WordPress site, we can head over to www.wpthemedetector.com and type the domain in the “Site to check” box:

It might take a second to load, but once it does you can see not only the theme, but also the widgets being used by that site.

From here, it is simply a matter of finding the theme and downloading it (or adding it through your WordPress admin control panel).

It is worth mentioning that if you are trying to emulate a theme that has been heavily customized, you will have to put some work in to get the same look.

This method does not work for every WordPress site 100% of the time, and there are even plugins that can hide the fact that you are using WordPress like Hide My WP. But, generally, for most WordPress sites it should work fine.