You’ve probably been to someone’s AMAZING website before and found yourself wondering – how the hell did they do that? Whether it’s an awesome Instagram grid or a killer pop up, you want to know what they used to achieve it. Get ready to play detective because I’m going to show you how to figure it out.
How to Tell Which WordPress Plugins are Being Used on a Website
The easiest way is to start with a free tool. There are several out there where you can put in a website URL and they’ll pull the plugin info for you. The problem is that they’re not always reliable. Sometimes they’re only able to pull some, but not all, of the plugin info – and you’re still left wondering WHAT that magic feature comes from.
The most reliable that I’ve found is BuiltWith. For the most part, this website does a really good job of identifying plugins and MUCH more. You can glean a lot about a website from doing this search – even their advertising networks. If you know me, you know I’m a HUGE fan of competitive analysis so I really like to use these hacks to see details from other websites in my niche.
But again, sometimes they can’t find everything. If you don’t think this is helping you find all of the plugins used, you can actually use a few hacks to see the CODE of the website and find the plugins there. Here’s how you do it:
1. By viewing the Sources tab under Developer Tools (only on Chrome browser).
I don’t believe you can do this on any other browser but it is SO easy to find plugins this way. Simply go to the top of your browser and hit:
View – Developer – Developer Tools.
Once the side menu pops up, go to the SOURCES tab and find wp-content. Click the arrow to show all of the folders and you’ll see one called ‘plugins’. Open that up and there you have it – a list of plugins being run on the site. As you can see, you can also get a lot of other information. You could look at fonts, themes, and tons of other assets. I cannot stress how valuable this can be!
2. By viewing the website’s source.
If you don’t have chrome, you can use this second trick to do a similar thing. It’s not laid out quite so simply but with a bit of deductive reasoning, you should be able to find what you’re looking for. Find the source by hitting:
VIEW – DEVELOPER – VIEW SOURCE
You can search for the term ‘plugin’, which usually works well, or if that doesn’t work you can manually scan the coding for anything that may be of interest. Look for headlines used in the blog around where the plugin is being used. You can search that term and know that the plugin coding you’re looking for should be right below.
PRO-TIP: Make sure you’re on the page where the exact plugin runs. If it runs on their opt-in page but not on their homepage, you might not be able to find it by looking at the homepage source code.
And that’s it – now you can see which plugins websites are using. If you found this helpful and want to see more content like this, PLEASE let me know in the comments! Don’t forget to hop into the free library for tons more content like this – plus free stock photos to help you boost your biz:
What do you think?