How To Find Which WordPress Plugin A Website Is Using

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Find WordPress Plugin on Website
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There are many WordPress plugins out there.

Everyday, a newer and possibly more exciting WordPress plugin is launched either on the WordPress plugin repo or on some premium WordPress marketplace.

I like discovering new WordPress plugins.

I especially find it quite tempting to know what plugins a popular website is using.

There are a few ways in which you can find the list of plugins used on a WordPress blog, but there is no way to know the complete list until that blog’s plugin folder is publicly accessible or you have the FTP login info. That said, there are still a few work-arounds to getting that list of plugins.

4 Tricks to Finding Out Which WordPress Plugins Are Used on a WordPress Site

Find Plugins Using Kali OS: “WPScan” command

This is the method for techies.

You can install Kali OS on your system using Parallels or VMware. On my Mac, I use Parallels to install Kali OS.

Using the following command in Terminal for Kali will let you scan any WordPress site.

Command: WPscan -u domain.com

Here is the result from one of my sites after using the “WPScan” command:

WpScan command Kali find plugins
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This command is also useful for finding vulnerabilities on any WordPress site (including yours).

If you are not tech savvy, you can also use any of the other suggested methods.

Identify WordPress Plugins Using WPThemeDetector:

The same tool we use to discover themes 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.

Here are the results:

Find WordPress Plugins used
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Out of 30+ plugins I use on my blog (you can see the complete list here), this free tool detected 8 plugins.

Here is the list of detected plugins:

I’m a little unsure of why it detected the last one (OptinMonster) as I’m not using a Facebook like box plugin. I’m actually using Facebook code to add a like box, but whatever, that’s OK as this tool detected the same plugin for almost every other blog I searched for.

Find Plugins Using Google Search:

This is what I call a quick hack and it might not work for popular WordPress blogs as they have already imposed essential security settings.

For many blogs who haven’t blocked access to their WP-content folder, you can use Google to search for the list of plugins they are using on their website.

Simply search Google with this query:

  • site:http://www.xxxxx.com/wp-content/plugins
    • (Replace “www.xxxxx.com” with your desired domain name)

To my surprise, one of my blogs is listing down all of its plugins:

WordPress plugins Google hack
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If you see this for your blog, you can login to your Google Webmaster tool and remove the directory Wp-content/plugins/ from search engines. Make sure the directory is blocked by your robots.txt file.

This might not work in all cases, yet it is a useful trick that you should know about.

Check Source Code:

This is another method which works most of the time, especially when someone is using a premium theme. You can either see something like */added by plugin name/* or you can search for “wp-content/plugins/” in the source code to see the list of plugins.

check wordpress blog source code
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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 new plugins which might be of interest to me.

I hope this tutorial has helped you to identify a few new plugins some of your favorite WordPress sites are using. If you know of any other method of finding out which plugins are being used by a website, let me know via the comments.

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Here are a few hand-picked guides for you to read next:

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Authored By
A Blogger, Author and a speaker! Harsh Agrawal is recognized as a leader in digital marketing and FinTech space. Fountainhead of ShoutMeLoud, and a Speaker at ASW, Hero Mindmine, Inorbit, IBM, India blockchain summit. Also, an award-winning blogger.

52 thoughts on “How To Find Which WordPress Plugin A Website Is Using”

  1. Shibam Kar

    Harsh Sir, A big big big thanks to you. This trick was extremely needed for me. I want to know which plugins are using my compettitors and you given the trick at the best time. Thanks again sir.

  2. Imran Khan

    Hi!
    Great methods to find out which WordPress Plugins a Website is using.
    Thanks to sharing this noteworthy post with us.

  3. Patrick

    Great insights. I never knew that the Google ‘site’ parameter could be used for the stealth operation 🙂

  4. loudtips

    great article you should have include whatwpthemeisthat.com it shows theme and plugins of a website built with wordpress

    1. Akhil

      You can also use http://builtwith.com/ to check what technology your competitors are using, just provide their url it displays all their information from SSL certificates to what WordPress plugins they are using.

  5. Nayan Kariya

    Great List Harsh, I am also aware with two such tricks which are mentioned above. but I have learnt some new tricks. Thanks

  6. Pratik Kumar

    Checked today the lists of plugins I use on wpthemedetector and it showed only two plugins.I am quite surprised with that.

  7. Palashtd

    I use wpthemedetector. I think it’s the best WordPress theme and plugin detector tool.

  8. Umair Ameen

    If someone knows about the plugins I use, Is there any security risk?

  9. Ravi Sharma

    Thanks harsh for such valuable information. I always use source code to check which plugins a website is using.
    Keep Shining
    Regards
    -Ravi

  10. Adesanmi Adedotun

    This is really cool most eespecially the third trick unlike other tricks. The second trick hardly work on most blog as many will block search engine from indexing the plugin folder using their robots.txt

  11. Chook

    Hey Peter,

    That’s a Great link 🙂
    It saves me from viewing page source and doing it the hard way.

  12. Adnan Shahid

    Hey Man! This trick is not working on my side, now what wrong with it?

  13. Jam Replika Murah

    I used this method, but the web , which i want to know was show blank page

  14. eHackz

    Hey! Harsh
    Great Post!!!! Very Nice

    Can you tell us which Plugging are you using?
    So that It will become useful for us.
    Thank you!

  15. Suneel

    Cool one there Harsh. Mind if I use your robots.txt file format for my blog too?

    When I tried whether my list is visible, luckily it isn’t.

    Thanks for sharing this trick.

  16. Ruhani Rabin

    Great writeup! i should link it up for proper explanation on the security risk on blogs exposing plugins folders .. take a look at my wordpress security article .. if you have some time 🙂 btw .. Keep up the good work

  17. Shiivendu Madhava

    Nice tip but It does not works for every website.It does not works for those websites whose directory access are restricted or search engines listing has been disabled in robots.txt.

    1. Harsh Agrawal

      Very true Shivendu. Idea here is to encourage everyone to protect their blog privacy by using robots.txt.

  18. Harsh Agrawal

    @ Viabhav @Raju
    One of them is because of ad rotate plugin, which is because of 125*125 advertisement slot at the side bar. That link will redirect you to the advertiser homepage.
    Another one is post views, which is use to show the stats of single post views to the reader, because of new theme that’s not working. 🙂

  19. Raju

    Suprise! surprise!! Shoutmeloud has 4 results for the query! Good post Harsh!
    Off topic: When I am viewing your site on 1024×768 screen, I have to scroll right to be able to view the contents completely. Kindly look into that. I have the same problem as well, but luckily no content is lost

  20. Nihar

    Even my blog was exposed to this. I then created index.html file and placed in plugins folder to avoid being shown to anybody.

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