I’ll show you three quick and easy tricks in your browser on how to tell if a website is WordPress. Read on to learn how!

What is WordPress?

If you already know what WordPress is (which is likely considering you just Googled the question), you can skip this step.

However, if you don’t, WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system (CMS).

It powers about 30% of all websites on the World Wide Web, including this one!

Why Would I Want to Know If a Website uses WordPress?

You might want to compare your WordPress site to another website you like the look of.

That way, you can do some more research and find the theme that the other website uses so you can use it in yours.

Solution 1: View Source

The quickest and easiest way how to tell if a website is WordPress is by inspecting the code behind the website.

You didn’t know you could do that, huh?

Well, in all modern web browsers exists a way to inspect some of the code that powers that website.

Yes, that means there is a way to copy websites, but we won’t go into that right now.

Assuming you use Google Chrome, right-click on any website and click “View page source” from the drop-down menu.

If you’re using Safari on MacOS, you will need to enable the developer tools from the menu in order to view the page source.

A new window will appear, showing you a bunch of code. If you’re a web developer, you should be able to break it down and understand what it’s doing.

If not, don’t worry, you can still find out if that website uses WordPress.

Press CTRL + F to bring up the find input field in your browser.

Search for “wp-includes” in the find input field.

wp-includes

What on earth is wp-includes you say? Well, the WP stands for WordPress, and the Includes is, well, a folder inside of a WordPress installation.

Images, videos, and GIFS all get uploaded to the wp-includes folder, and then the WordPress site will reference that URL structure when displaying them on the website.

If you find any instances of wp-includes inside of the website code, then you know that it is powered by WordPress!

Solution 2: Navigate to /wp-admin

This one isn’t always reliable as some WordPress websites block all access to /wp-admin to prevent unauthorized third-party access.

Basically, to stop people from hacking the website.

You can try it on SitesMonster though! Go on, give it a try.

Navigate to https://sitesmonster.com/wp-admin.

See the WordPress sign-in page appear? That means that SitesMonster is powered by WordPress!

Solution 3: Look for Powered by WordPress in the Footer

I left this solution until last because it’s the least reliable solution out of the three.

Why?

Because websites aren’t obliged to say if they are powered by WordPress.

Take my website, SitesMonster. Look for the powered by WordPress label in the footer and you’ll be searching for a very long time!

That’s because it doesn’t exist. I took it out because I custom built this theme with my own two hands.

I’ve noticed that the powered by WordPress label only exists on certain themes, like the official WordPress themes provided by Automattic, the company that owns and maintains WordPress.

If you’re interested in more WordPress development tutorials, then check out How to Add HTML to a category in WordPress.