In 5.4 the site hardening checks have changed and it’s now also checking for unused themes on child sites. When I check the details for a child site and it shows this check as “bad”, I try to click the “Manage Themes” button, but all that happens is a loading circle that appears in place of the red button that says “Bad”.
When I click the 3 dots behind the site in the overview widget I actually go to the ThemesManage page, but it only shows the default screen where I have to do a manual search.
And what’s the definition of this check? I just removed all but one default theme on a child site, synced the site again and did another check. It still shows as Bad.
I’ve just updated the sites and a website with Divi as the active theme and one standard theme (Twenty Twenty) still shows as Bad.
Site Health on the website shows no issues. Another sync doesn’t help.
As I mentioned, only one theme installed, or one pair of main/child theme, will be marked as Good in this hardening check.
If you believe that the presence of one standard theme (e.g. Twenty Twenty) should not be considered Bad in this check, please leave a suggestion about this on our feedback site: https://voice.mainwp.com
WordPress considers it as a site health issue if there’s no default theme installed as fall back, so this conflicts with each other. We will always have an issue as long as 1 inactive default theme present is considered bad. I don’t think that should be a feature request, because this is really a mistake and should be solved.
A default wordpress theme installed as a fall back is considered best practice by all, right?
So I definitely agree with Jos that this should not be marketed as bad in the monitor.
We are thinking about tweaking the Site Hardening feature, so moving forward, you would be allowed to retain one inactive default WordPress theme as a fallback option. This change ensures your site always has an emergency theme available without cluttering your installation with extra inactive themes.
If your site has more than one inactive default WP theme, you would get a warning and suggestion to keep only one as your fallback. Additionally, for sites using a child theme, the required inactive parent theme will remain allowed, and you’ll still be able to keep one inactive default theme.
