How to detect the WordPress theme on any site?

This article was updated on August 6th, 2020 at 05:57 am

Sometimes I get asked by clients to build a site just like another site. Little would you know about what the other site is, what it is made up of and what technology is behind it.

Often you have to do a lot of reverse engineering to figure out the technology behind a site. I normally use tools like WhatRuns or BuiltWith to figure it out.

When it comes to WordPress plugins and themes, it is a little difficult to find out, if the owners have preferred to hide it.

A good practice to find what theme a website is using is to go to the source code and check what the theme name is.

Right-click on any page > View Source > Search for “themes/” > Google whatever name shows up.

This is probably the easiest way out. But sometimes developers (who don’t want to reveal their tech and theme) renames files or deploys tricks like this to hide critical information.

That’s when you need a plugin or another tool.

Two tools that I use to find out what plugins and themes are used on any WordPress theme are 1. WP Theme Detector and 2. What Theme is That.

Both are amazing tools, where if you just put in the site’s domain name, it’ll auto-detect what WordPress theme and plugins are used.

Pretty neat way to reverse engineer websites, isn’t it?

What tools do you use to sniff out technology behind a website?