In today’s era, when almost every person is online and running his own blog to share thoughts and experience among his followers. You might have gone through popular sites and blogs and wondered what themes and plugins the blog is using? How it look so wonderful? What strategies that blogger adopted to make his blog look wonderful and work better.
When you visit any popular site, you feel to have the same look and functionality of that site for your blog too. So today, we are gonna to write about themes and plugins a site uses. Since, WordPress made it so easy to switch between themes any time. We get more curious to know about the themes and plugins to get on our blog.
How to Detect Themes and Plugins any website or Blog is using:-
Well, here I’m gonna to share 3 ways to get info about themes and plugins any site is using.
1. Identifying themes and plugins using online website tools
i. builtWith
This is the most valuable site which comes into mind when you want to know everything about site. builtWith shows the underlying technologies a blog is using along with its hosting provider, web server type, plugins, SSL certificates, advertising networks and email providers. You can also find if a site is hosted on WordPress or using any other CMS (Content Management System).
Here, when we tested our blog on builtWith, it showed nearly all the correct information about our blog.
You can see our full list of widgets we use at http://builtwith.com/WebLogCentral
You can also check yourself by visiting the site and searching for the domain of your website.
ii. WhatWPThemeIsThat
WhatWPThemeIsThat is another great tool to find the themes and plugins a site is using. If you search for our website, it’ll show what plugins and themes we use for our blog. Although, you should know that these websites works for themes and plugins that they have in their database already. If some blog is using a specific theme which is designed particularly for a blog then WhatWPThemeIsThat would fail to identify the plugins and themes.
So, when we searched for our website it showed details for our blog about the themes and plugins we use.
You can check WhatWPThemeIsThat for your blog.
iii. WPThemeDetector
Another tool we use to find themes and plugins is WPThemeDetector. If you search for our blog, I will show you complete list of themes and plugins we use for our website. The most useful thing about WordPressThemeDetector is that you get the download link of themes and plugins on the same place. You can also see whether the plugin/theme is free or premium. It also tell you how reputed plugin is and at what position it stands.
2. Identifying themes and plugins through source code
This s another method which quite well if theme detector tool discussed above fails. You can use this method to find specially premium plugins a blog is using. Online tools fails to detect premium plugins because they are not present in their directories. But using this method, you can identify the plugins and themes. You can either see something */ added by plugin name /* or you can search for wp-content/plugins/ in the source code to see the list of plugins. This way you can find the names of themes and plugins and Google them. This method is used if not any other method working because at least you will have the source code of the webpage with you whenever you visit the blog. Isn’t it?
3. Identifying themes and plugins via Google Search
You know we can use Google more efficiently to surf the web as it provides a number tools to make job much easier. So, Google can be used to access the internet folders of blogs assuming that blog has not restricted access to its folders. Many blogs don’t permit to access the folders inside their WordPress blog. But if a blog is allowing you then you can find the plugins and themes a blog is using by typing the exact address of the blog directory where the plugins are stored.
Simply search Google with this search query:
site:http://www.abcd.com/wp-content/plugins (Replace abcd.com with domain name you want to visit).
Note: This hack is not good. Any blog should not permit access to its directories to the public at any cost. It may cause security issues to your blog. If you are accessing your plugins through this then please disallow public access to your files. You can login to your webmaster tool and remove the wp-content/plugins from there. You should block directory in your robot.txt file too. Don’t worry of you are not able to access any website using this and provide the result seen below. Blog might have disallowed access to its directories.
Well thanks. Now days blogs usually use their own customized plugins and themes. So, if you want to have them for yourself too, you can contact developers for this issue. Well, thanks again for giving for valuable time.
Great piece of content. Anyone struggling to find what themes and plugins a blog is using can easily find using these tools. In fact, I would suggest one more Google Chrome which can tell visitor on which platform the particular website is built. The extension is called Wappalyzer. Try it and recommend it to your users.
Yeah, you have said it right. And, I already have been using Wappalyzer Extension to see on what platform a particular website is built. Anyway, Thanks for advice. 🙂