How to tell if a site is built in WordPress? Well, previously we can easily spot is it the website made with WordPress but now many paid plugins such as hide my WP or even optimization plugin can hide that from public.
Anyway, we will show you 10 methods to identify is it the website is running wordpress.
Table of Contents
Type /wp-admin after the domain
Just type /wp-admin at the end of the domain. If your browser bring you to the login screen, yes, the website is using WordPress CMS
Type /robots.txt after the domain
If the website owner care about seo, they will build robots.txt and this file have to be place in the root. What is robots.txt? It tell web robots such as google crawler to skip the directories. People usually also insert their sitemap there for better crawling purposes. For example
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
Disallow: /readme.html
Disallow: /wp-login.php
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /xmlrpc.php
Disallow: /?s=
Disallow: /search/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
Sitemap: yourdomain/wp-sitemap.xmlSometimes, website owner or seo consultant also use robots.txt to block paid seo tools crawler such as ahrefs bot.
Just type /robots.txt at the end of the domain. If nothing found, the website do not have robots.txt
If robots.txt, check is it they disallow wp-admin, wp-content or /?s
wp-admin is the initial part of WordPress CMS and /?s is the search url slug in WordPress.
Type /wp-sitemap.xml after the domain
The major selling point of WordPress 5.5 ( released on August 11, 2020 ) is the XML sitemap. Unfortunately, the sitemap URLs are incorrectly paginated. WordPress team did a great job and fix this issue on WordPress 5.5.1 ( released on September 1, 2020 )
So you can use this trick to identify is it the website built with WordPress or not.
Type /readme.html after the domain
After you type /readme.html and you found this, yes, the website is using WordPress. A note. Senior usually will delete this file, not to block people knowing that they are using WordPress CMS but for extra protection.
This html file is super easy to hack. We also recommend delete it
Type /license.txt after the domain
After you type /license.txt to the end of the domain and if you found this, yes, the website is WordPress. Same tip as above. We recommend delete this file to secure your website.
Search for wp-content
If you are using window operating system, press CTRL + U, a new window will open. Press F3, the search box will show in google chrome. Type wp-content. If you found it, yes, the website is build using WordPress CMS.
None window operating system, you can just right click, then choose view page source
A hint for you. If the website block right click, you can just type view-source: in the beginning of the website domain and this will also do the trick.
Search for meta name=”generator”
Same as above, view page source and this time, search for meta name=”generator”
If the website is using WordPress, the below code will show.
<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 5.6.2" />Use online CMS detector
There are more than 10 online tools that can detect WordPress CMS. We will give you the top three.
1. CMS Detector
CMS detector can detect more than 400 different types of CMS. They also have a tool to help you detect which theme a WordPress website using.
2. What CMS
This is an awesome tool. The tool not only showing you the CMS, also show you web server type, page builder and programming language. The only thing that may make people pissed off is they will show your domain into the recent detection section at the bottom of the site.
3. BuiltWith
This is so far the best online cms checker. This tool will show you everything, including the ssl certificate provider, tracking scripts, CDN, framework. google font and plugins. No wonder they are so popular now.
Use Wappalyzer google chrome extension
A screenshot tell 1000 words. Cool?
Wappalyzer chrome extension have more than 1 million users and more than 1800 positive reviews. You can trust them.
Inspect element with google chrome
Google is a kind company. Google already provided everything we need. You can check is it the website build with WordPress with just 3 simple steps.
- Right click, choose inspect ( or you may hold CTRL + SHIFT + I )
- Click the sources tab
- If you see wp-content, yes, the website is a WordPress CMS
Final Thoughts:
Please take note that now many paid caching tools such as Perfmatters can also hide the WordPress element. If all the above methods also fail, please feel free to contact us. We will use special tricks to help you detect is it the website using WordPress CMS or not.