Best tools to check WordPress theme and plugins

Have you ever wondered what’s the theme of that cool site? Or even curious if that site is using WordPress or not? If it’s using WordPress, what are the plugins it’s using? Here are best tools to check WordPress theme and plugins

Here are some online tools to reveal them.

Web Browser Developer Tool

This tool requires some knowledge of HTML. You can use this tool on both popular browsers: Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. All you have to do is inspect the element and look for such patterns inside the HTML there:

• A string that said “WP”. This is one sign that the site you’re inspecting might use WordPress.

• wp-content/plugins. Behind that /plugins/, it’s the name of the plugin that’s running on that WordPress page.

As an example, if you see something like wp-content/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons, then the plugin’s name is most likely something like  Podcast Subscribe Buttons. 

After that, you can copy that name on Google and fire up a search. Here’s what I get when I do this.

Google even lets us know that plugin’s homepage. It’s https://wordpress.org/plugins/podcast-subscribe-buttons/. The next thing is depending on how you will use this information.

But if those are too much for you, try the other tools below.

IsItWP

URL: https://www.isitwp.com/

This is the tool for checking if the site you’re trying to inspect is using WordPress or not. You can see it by reading its name. To use it is easy. Just type the site URL on the text box and clicked that  ANALYZE WEBSITE button.

Wait several seconds and you’ll get the result.

The good thing about this tool is it’s simple and fast. Not only that, but it’s also able to tell you the hosting provider of the site’s use. Yet, if the site is putting Cloudflare in front of its host, just like mine, you’ll see Cloudflare as its hosting provider. The host of this site is VeeroTech.

However, it often lacks information about the theme used by the scanned WordPress site, unless the scanned site is using a popular theme like Divi or Avada.

WordPress Theme Detector

URL: https://www.wpthemedetector.com/

I believe this tool is not a replacement for that IsItWp tool. I think it’s better as a complementary tool to check the theme used by the scanned site if you can’t get them from IsItWp.

As its name, this tool seems to focus its effort to detect the theme used by the scanned WordPress site.

Scan WP

URL: https://scanwp.net/

Unlike the other tools above, I found that this tool is better to detect the plugins used by the scanned site. However, if the owner of the site is renaming all the plugins folder, this tool won’t be able to detect anything.

I have tried it personally in the past on one of my test WordPress sites. I renamed all folders under plugins/ and then I scan the site with this tool. The result is that it can’t detect any plugin on my test site.

So, this is an automated version of the process I described using Web Browser Developer Tool above.

From what I read there, it seems the same developers are building this tool along with that  WordPress theme detector tool I’ve mentioned above.