5.4 Site Hardening - Inactive theme

Hi, on the latest version 5.4, Site Hardening is reporting ‘Bad’ for child sites using a Child Theme, with the Main Theme as inactive (Example, Divi/Divi Child). I cannot find anywhere to adjust a threshold as I am sure many site owners will also leave the default latest WP theme inactive, leaving 1 active, 2 inactive - but adhering to WP recommendations.

Just my thoughts

I just logged in to report the same thing but found you beat me to it. Every site I create I have the main theme inactive as I use a child theme for custom changes etc. so the changes to site hardening are now reporting all sites as having issues when in reality they’re not as you can’t have the child theme without an inactive main theme.

Update. I’ve logged out of my Dashboard site, cleared cache, history etc and resynced. My Dashboard site, with only one active theme it’s reporting as ‘bad’

I’ve reported this as well in V5.4 - Site hardening button to manage themes doesn't work including some other issues with this functionality.

Thank you all for reporting this to us.

We are working on a solution which will be included in the hotfix releasing very soon.

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We’ve just released hotfix v5.4.0.1 for the Dashboard and Child plugins.

Can you please see if that resolves the issue with Inactive Theme Hardening check for you?

If you have only one theme installed, or one pair of main/child theme, this hardening check should now be marked as Good .

In that case WordPress Site Health shows a warning, that there’s no default theme installed as backup, so this is conflicting.

v5.4.0.1 did not fix the issue for me. Still inactive themes flagged as bad.

For the one theme, or pair of main/child theme, this has resolved for me, but then nearly 95% all use the same main/child pairing. As Jos Klever says, WP site Health reports “Your site does not have any default theme. Default themes are used by WordPress automatically if anything is wrong with your chosen theme.” So perhaps an additional step may be required to ignore the Default theme of our choice in the MainWP Site Hardening.
Once a WP Core update arrives, we will be back to square one, as it will install the default theme once more.


This is what I now see when I have a site with a child/main theme pair in the site list page. If I check the site itself then everything shows as good, so this hover help text isn’t correct as the site is connected and everything’s actually good.

Feature update proposal posted here: V5.4 - Site hardening button to manage themes doesn't work - #7 by Alwin

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