How To Find Which WordPress Plugin A Website is Using

There are many WordPress plugins out there and every day a new and exciting WordPress plugin is launched either on WordPress plugin repo or on any premium WordPress marketplace. I like discovering new WordPress plugins and especially when a popular website is using it, I find it quite tempting to know what plugins that website is using. There are few ways by which you can find the list if plugins on a WordPress blog, but there is no way to know the complete list until blog plugin folder is publicly accessible or you have FTP login for that blog. Though there are still few work-around to get the list of plugins which I will list down here.

Before that you should check out my earlier post on how to find which WordPress theme is being used by a blog. And today’s you will lea about finding the name of plugins.

3 Tricks to find name of WordPress plugin used on a WordPress Website

Identify WordPress Plugin using WPThemeDetector:

The same tool we used to discover theme can also be used to find the plugins list. I used WPThemeDetector to see how accurate it is by checking the list of plugins I use here at ShoutMeLoud and here is the result which I see:

Out of 30+ plugins I use on my blog (You can see complete list here), this free tool detected 8 of the plugins on my blog. Here are the list of detected plugins:

Though I’m unsure why it detected the last one in the above list as I’m not using Facebook like box plugin. I’m actually using Facebook code to add like box, but that’s ok as this tool detected same plugin for almost any other blogs I searched for.

Find plugins using Google search:

This is what I call a quick hack and it might not work for popular WordPress blog as they have already imposed the essential security settings. For many blogs who haven’t blocked access to their WP-content folder, they can be searched for the list of plugins they are using on the blog.

Simple search Google with this search query :

site:http://www.xxxxxx.com/wp-content/plugins (Replace xxxxx.com with any other domain name). To my surprise one of my blog is listing down all the plugins:

If you see this for your blog, you can login to your Google Webmaster tool and remove the directory Wp-content/plugins/ from search engine. Make sure the directory is blocked by your robots.txt file. Make sure you replace xxxx with the blog name. This might not work in all the cases, yet it will be useful trick that you should know.

3) Check source code:

This is another method which works most of the time and especially when someone is using a premium theme. You can either see something lie */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 at least find the name of many plugins used by any WordPress website on the planet. I use these methods once in a while for popular WordPress blogs to find out new plugins for myself. I hope this tutorial must have helped you to find name of plugins for the WordPress blog you are looking for. In case if you know of any other method, let me know via Idea.

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