6 Ways to Find if a Website Uses WordPress CMS

WordPress is free, open source and powerful blogging platform. You can also customize the features to have multipurpose websites. In addition, the WordPress ecosystem becomes very big with commercial themes and plugin companies investing a lot in the development. WordPress powers almost one third of the websites on the internet. However, it is not easy to find whether a website uses WordPress just by looking the site on the browser frontend. If you are a website owner or developer, you may be curious to find a website is using WordPress content management system or not. Here are different ways you can find that.

Related: How to find a theme used on a WordPress site?

6 Ways to Find Website Uses WordPress CMS

1. Generator meta tag
2. Themes and plugins path in meta links tag
3. Check media files path
4. Use WordPress theme detector tool
5. Google PageSpeed Insights tool
6. Check license.txt or readme.txt file

1. Generator Meta Tag

WordPress uses a generator meta tag to show the current version used on the website. You can easily find the by using Developer Tools in the browser or viewing the page source.

• Right click on the webpage you want to inspect and view the page source.
• Press “Control + F” keys in Windows and “Command + F” keys in Mac to open the search box.
• Type “generator” in the search box and check whether the page has the relevant meta tag.
• The generator if presents will show the current WordPress version used on the website. It should look like below:

<meta name=”generator” content=”WordPress 5.2.1″ />

Remember, most of the WordPress sites use caching to combine and minify the source files. Therefore, you may not see the generator meta tag easily on the source code. Below is how it may look like on the source code of a webpage.

In addition to the WordPress generator, some popular plugins like Easy Digital Downloads also use their own generator tag to show the plugin version. If you do not find WordPress meta tag then check whether you can find other meta tags generated by plugins.  

2. Check Themes and Plugins Meta Links Tag

The issue with generator meta tag is that it will reveal the version of the WordPress and plugins. Many website owners will hide or remove the generator tags using security plugins like All in One WordPress Security and Firewall plugin. In this case, you will not find any meta generator tags on the source code. However, you can analyze the source code to find the meta links tag.

• Right click and view the source code of the webpage.
• Search for themes or plugins to highlight all the occurrences.
• WordPress uses the themes and plugins in the path “/wp-content/themes/” and “/wp-content/plugins/” respectively.
• In the below example screenshot, you can see the site uses Generatepress theme.

Some of the websites disable the right click function to avoid content copying. In such case, you can use “Inspect Element” option to check the meta tags in Developer Tools. Alternatively, press F12 key to open Developer Tools console on your browser to see the source code. When you find any links with “/wp-content” is an indication that the website uses WordPress CMS.

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3. Check Media Files Path

If you are not able to find the details using meta tags, the other option is to check the file path of images, PDFs or videos on the website. WordPress uses a default file path like “/wp-content/uploads/” to store the media files. If there are no images on the page, at least you can find the path of the favicon which is also available under “/wp-content/uploads/” folder.

4. Use WordPress Theme Detector Tool

If none of the options are helping then you may need to use third party tools to check the site’s content. We have a free WordPress theme detector tool that will check the stylesheet of the theme to find which theme it uses.

• Open WordPress theme detector tool.
• Type the website address and hit enter.
• The tool will show the name of the theme the WordPress website is using along with the WordPress version from the generator meta tag.

• If the site does not use WordPress, then you will see a message like “This does not look like a WordPress Site, It maybe a highly customized theme”.

Related: How to find number of pages on a website?

5. Use Google PageSpeed Insights Tool

As mentioned, WordPress is becoming an ecosystem that many web companies cannot avoid. Nowadays, Google is also offering dedicated instructions for WordPress on many of their services. Currently, the PageSpeed Insights tool shows the WordPress icon if the website uses WordPress CMS.

• Launch Google PageSpeed Insights tool.
• Type the webpage URL and click the “Analyze” button.
• Scroll down the results page and click on any of the section under “Opportunities”. Google will show the options to optimize the site with the WordPress logo.
• Below is an example you can see the WordPress optimization tips for the render blocking resources issue.

• You will not see a logo if the site does not use WordPress.

6. Check License and Readme Text Files

WordPress is an open source software, distributed under GNU General Public License. The download package comes with readme.txt and license.txt files. Unless the site owner disabled viewing these files for security reasons, you can easily view them on the browser.

Use the URL like “https://www.examplesite.com/license.txt” or “https://www.examplesite.com/readme.txt” to find whether the website is using WordPress content management system.