How to Find your Parent Theme’s Handle

You need the parent handle to target if you’re loading CSS via a plugin. Here’s how to find it.

How to Find your Parent Theme's Handle – with the theme active, open Inspector and find the primary stylesheet. It will have an ID that ends with "-css". The parent handle is that ID without the "-css". Share on X

For example, the KadenceWP theme loads it’s primary stylesheet with the id kadnece-global-css as seen below. 

<link rel="stylesheet" id="kadence-global-css" href="https://www.mattcromwell.com/wp-content/themes/kadence/assets/css/global.min.css?ver=1.2.19" media="all">

So if you want to load some custom CSS after the Kadence theme’s primary stylesheet, you’d want to use kadence-global as the parent handle.

Posts linking to this Tip

  1. How I Moved Customizer CSS to an External File (and Why It Matters)