How To Check If Website Uses WordPress ?

There are millions of websites available that are hosted using WordPress. Now, newly launching websites are mostly using WordPress. This article lists different ways to check if website uses WordPress. Being a blog owner or web developer, there may come a time when you will need to check if website uses WordPress. There was a time when it was easy to know if any website is using WordPress or not. But now WordPress users have a lot of options to change the presentation of the blog in such a professional way that makes it difficult to check if website uses WordPress or not. So frankly speaking, by simply looking at blog design it is not easy to say anything.

How to Check if Website Uses WordPress?

Following are the tips that will help you to check if website uses WordPress:

1) Check for “WordPress” in the footer

This is a simple way to check if website uses WordPress. On many WordPress sites, you can see this line in the footer – “Proudly powered by WordPress”. Some free WordPress themes have this line by default and blog owners might not have bothered changing it, assuming the theme they’re using has/had it there by default. But this is not the same case with all WordPress themes. So you will need to check for below-mentioned options also.

2) Readme.html 

Some WordPress installations have the default readme file enabled. This file provides all the basic information about the site’s version of WordPress and some instructions on how to work with the WordPress platform. You need to append ‘/readme.html’ after the blog name. Eg. http://yourdomain.com/readme.html

3) Add /wp-admin to the end of domain

This is another way to check if website uses WordPress. You just need to add /wp-admin to the site’s domain (Eg. www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin). If that website is using WordPress then it will lead to the WordPress Admin page of that site and will ask you to enter login details.

Alternatively, you can also use wp-login.php instead of wp-admin as shown below:

http://yourdomain.com/wp-login.php

4)  Look for ‘wp-content’ or ‘wp-includes’ or ‘wp-uploads’ in the source code

To check this, open a website and check the source code of the website (Right Click on Page –> View Page Source). It will open up a new tab of the source code of the webpage. Just do Search (Ctrl+F) and check for   ‘wp-content’ or ‘wp-includes’ or ‘wp-uploads’. If you are able to locate these parameters in the source code then it means the website is built using WordPress.

5) Generator Tag

While checking the source code of the website, You can also check <meta name=”generator”> it will even show you the WordPress version that website is using.

Note: If you want to remove this tag from your site, you can do so by adding this line to your functions.php file:

remove_action(‘wp_head’, ‘wp_generator’);

Other Tools

Apart from checking manually, there are also a number of tools available to check if website uses WordPress. A few of them are:

1) BuiltWith 

To check using this tool, you just need to input the address of the site you want to check and you’ll get a report containing a lot more details than just whether the site is using WordPress or not.

2) Is it WordPress

This is similar to BuiltWith, you have to go to this and just need to enter site address it will do the work for you.

Web browser extensions

Apart from some online tools you can also make things a bit quicker and use a web browser extension instead.

1. Chrome Sniffer

This is the extension of Google Chrome, and it is the best way among all mentioned ways to check if website uses WordPress. You need to Install Chrome Sniffer and it will appear in your browser bar. As you navigate to different websites, the icon will change to reflect the software being used. You can easily find websites that use WordPress.

2. Wappalyzer

This is the Mozilla Firefox extension. It identifies software on websites.

That’s all from my side. What strategies are you using to check if website uses WordPress? Do share your strategies and suggestions in the comment section below.