Now Detecting Parent Themes for WordPress Sites Using Child Themes

Last modified: October 5, 2026

Some of you may be scratching your head right now, saying… What?! It’s pretty simple – let’s begin with an explanation.

What is a Child Theme?

A Child theme is used by experienced wordpress developers while making many changes to already built wordpress themes. So, basically if you are using “The Review” theme for example, instead of changing the css file, the functions file and many more, they create an entirely new “theme” which consists of only the files they have actually changed. This is done for a simple reason, when updating the theme, none of the changes will be overridden. However they have to call this theme a new name. Ususally it will be called the-review-child in our example, however there are no rules.

Scan WP Parent Themes

Up until now, our wordpress theme detector would detect a site built with a child theme, as the child theme name. For that reason we had less information to give you. Nowadays, even if you search for a site built with a child theme, we could still tell you what parent theme they are using. If you would like to do this manually, here is how to tell what WordPress theme a site is using.