Why doesn’t my WordPress theme show up? | Blog Mum

Why doesn't my WordPress theme show up?

So you've found a theme you like, and added it to your WordPress installation, but when you go to your dashboard to activate it, it's not there.

The most likely cause of this is that the theme hasn't been uploaded exactly correctly, and therefore WP can't see it. Here's how to check:

Open up your FTP client.
Navigate on the server side to wp-content/themes.
Do you see the theme folder for the missing theme? If not, it wasn't uploaded at all.
If the theme folder appears to be there, open it up. You should see a lot of files: index.php, header.php etc. etc. etc. If, however, you see only one other folder, that's your problem:
so let's start over. Delete the theme folder from wp-content.
Re-upload the theme folder from your computer, making sure that the structure is wp-content/themes/theme-folder/theme files, with no extra folder before the theme files.
You should then be able to see the theme from the dashboard appearance > themes.

If the theme appears to have been uploaded correctly, then the other thing to try is changing the name of the folder. Some setups take a dislike to folder names with spaces, or with hyphens, so try renaming it removing any non-alphanumeric characters.

What's your style?

Updated to add, another way I found to break it If the theme doesn't have a stylesheet named style.css, again the theme will not show in the Admin > Themes section - so rename the file.

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