How to Tell if a Website is WordPress

WordPress is the most popular website platform, powering more than 455 million of the world’s 1.3 billion websites. But how can you tell if the website you’re using is based on it?

That’s what you’re about to find out. In this post, we show you how to tell if a website is WordPress quickly and easily without any fuss. Here’s what you need to do:

Check for the Word “WordPress” In the Footer

Here’s a dead giveaway that a website is on WordPress: you can see the word “WordPress” in the footer. Many sites will keep the text “powered by WordPress” at the bottom of all their pages because WordPress includes it automatically.

However, website administrators can remove this quite easily, so it’s not a surefire way to detect whether a website is made on the platform.

Add /wp-admin to the End of the Domain

Default administrator login pages for WordPress websites are just the website name, followed by “/wp-admin.” Therefore, adding this suffix to the end of the website’s URL brings up the WordPress login page, confirming its status as a WordPress site.

If you get something that looks like a login page but doesn’t contain any WordPress branding, you’re still looking at a WordPress site. That’s because administrators can change login fields to make them look different. However, if you get an error 404 from your browser telling you that it can’t find the page, it’s not a WordPress site.

Check The Source Code

If you’re worried that the admin page is at a different address, or you’d just prefer to use a different method to determine if a site is WordPress or not, try looking up “wp-content” or “WordPress” in the source code.

To do this, enter the website and then right-click and click “View Source.” Viewing the source will bring up the website’s code in a separate viewer. You can then search for wp-content and WordPress. If you find either of these terms in the code, then there’s a good chance that you are looking at a WordPress website.

Try an Online Tool or Service

If all that sounds a little too technical, you can now use online tools and services to do it for you. These tell you whether a website is WordPress immediately, instead of requiring you to sleuth around, collecting evidence.

BuiltWith is one of the most popular tools at present. You just type in the website domain name and it will scan for WordPress usage for you, telling you both whether it is a WordPress site and the version currently operating. You can also use isitwp, which works similarly to get an instant answer.

Install A Chrome Extension

Lastly, you might want to install the Library Sniff Chrome extension. This tells you which version of WordPress is operating on the sites you visit.