The following is part of a question I received from a reader, Jim, last week.

I’ve noticed that a lot of designers today are hiding their “theme name” from their competitors. For example, this is a site that will show you which wordpress theme someone is using: http://whatwpthemeisthat.com/. I’ve seen a couple of others too.

All of the sites that I’ve seen are designated on a secure server: https instead of http (which I’ve read Google now prefers). It appears that they are changing the name of the theme, for example: Divi to EngageWP.

This may not be worth your time. Can I pay you to teach me this?

First, I did not charge Jim to write this post, although I greatly appreciated that he offered, and was willing to do so. Second, I do not use Divi on this site, I use Genesis (it’s amazing)! 😉

I replied to Jim’s email to confirm I understood what he was looking to do, and, essentially, he wants to remove the theme header that WordPress requires, so that it’s not visible to anyone with enough technical savvy (not much required here) to know where to look.

In this post, I’m going to show you how to prevent the WordPress theme header from being visible to users, and, in addition, to load a minified version of your theme’s stylesheet. These two go well together, as you’ll read.

The things you’ll need are:

1. A minified version of your theme’s main stylesheet, style.css (i.e. style.min.css). This file can go anywhere in the theme’s folder, but keep it somewhere that makes sense, such as the root, or a “css” sub-folder. If you aren’t familiar with any development tools to automatically minify a stylesheet, you can use a browser tool to paste in your CSS, and receive back a minified version. Remember, a minified file is one that will contain no comments, spacing, indents, etc., and is basically unreadable. Loading a minified stylesheet is preferred over a non-minified version because its footprint is smaller, and it takes less time to load.
2. A style.css file (not minified) that is free of any actual styling. This file must include the normal theme header, as required by WordPress. If it does not, WordPress will not recognize your theme, and it will not activate (or it will be deactivated and replaced with a default theme). The header information is all this file should contain.
3. A backup of your theme. This is “optional” in the sense that we won’t be using it in this tutorial, but it’s good to have if anything goes wrong.

Since your theme now has a style.css file with a valid theme header, but no actual CSS, it will properly activate, but nothing will be styled. To fix that, paste this snippet of code into your theme’s functions.php file.

What this code is doing is telling WordPress to load the minified stylesheet, rather than the normal style.css file. This is done via the stylesheet_uri filter. However, this code does not relieve us of having to include a style.css file in the theme, which is why it must be included – remember, this file is how WordPress recognizes a theme.

Since the minified stylesheet, the file now being loaded on the frontend of your website, does not contain any comments, it will not include any header information. Also, since WordPress now loads this file over the default style.css file, no one will be able to see your theme’s header information. Not only is this method blocking users from seeing that information, it’s also allowing your website to load faster (even just a little bit) since the file size of your stylesheet is smaller.

Before I wrap this up, I want to point out that this method is not going to prevent everyone from knowing you use WordPress, nor will it entirely block ALL information that can indicate which theme you are running. For example, someone who knows how can look at the source of your site, and easily discover the directory name of your theme. While some plugins can get you close, I don’t believe it’s possible to completely, 100% hide the fact that you use WordPress.