WPShout.com has a great article that explains how to easily find websites that are using the theme you’re thinking about buying or using. One of the first things I try to do before downloading or purchasing a theme is to find actual websites that are using the design. While some theme companies have a showcase area highlighting these sites, most of them do not. Using the technique shared by WPShout, I was able to discover this neat looking child theme of TwentyThirteen.
According to WPShout, it’s as simple as a Google search. Simply type in “wp-content/themes/[theme-name]” ,quotation marks and all, and look for a search result that looks like a PHP scripting error. WPShout explains that Google sometimes indexes these errors which is why the name of the theme shows up in search results. I’ll let you read the article to figure out the secondary way of viewing live sites with themes you’re interested in but I thought this was an ingenious way of finding them. It will still take a little work on the user’s part to find the sites using the theme they are looking for, but this is a good stepping stone towards finding them. If nothing else, it enables you to see some PHP fatal error messages.
Of course I had to try it and found several sites which have the same theme as I use in their themes directory, even if they are not actually using it. This brought me another set of thoughts, on security, so I checked out my own site and noted, with a sigh of relief, a 404 page came up rather than the directory. So, I guess the idea is good for two things!