I had someone contact me recently that wanted to know the name of the WordPress Plugin I was using on my sidebar for social media. I’m used to just getting this info on my own using Google Chrome’s inspect element feature, as it works for the vast majority of WordPress Plugins. Usually there is a class or ID in the HTML code that reveals its name. Since its clear that not everyone does this, I thought I’d provide a guide on how to do this to benefit those who aren’t doing this already. So here’s how to identify the name of a WordPress plugin on someone else’s website without having to ask them for it (at least in most cases this works).
- Open up their website in the Google Chrome Browser.
- Hover over the WordPress Plugin that you want to identify with your cursor.
- Right click on it and select “Inspect element” like in the screenshot below:
- Find the parent element of the WordPress Plugin. You can select different lines of HTML code in code view and the highlighting will change accordingly or you can re-inspect the element visually on the WordPress Plugin until you find the parent element. You’ll know it’s the parent element if when you inspect the element the entire WordPress Plugin is highlighted like in the following screenshot:
- Look for a class or ID that looks like the name of the WordPress Plugin. In this instance it is pretty obvious as you can see class=”metro-social metro-height” in the screenshot below. The class “metro-height” sounds like a setting for height for the metro Plugin, so we would likely go with “metro-social” instead.
- Now simply Google the WordPress Plugin’s class without the hyphens and append “wordpress plugin” to the end like in the following screenshot:
- There you have it, the WordPress Plugin you found on someone’s website that you wanted to use on yours. It’s that easy. Enjoy your lovely new WordPress Plugin!
I’m planning on making a Google Chrome plugin that will detect WordPress Plugins automatically, but this is the next best thing until I get around to it.
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Thanks Andy for that useful bit of information.
Good idea on the plugin!
I just published my latest Google Chrome Extension named “WordPress Plugin Sniffer” that detects WordPress Plugins on any WordPress website, you can view/install it in in the Chrome Web Store: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wordpress-plugin-sniffer/jdmbobghippoogeagbcimaolcfbjoihk – Enjoy!
Hi – how do I access the Plugin sniffer plug-in once it is installed please? It has not show up in extension toolbar and right click is not it either. Thanks in advance. Jonnie
Useful tip Andy.
I’ve tried to find out what plugin was being used in the past and used Chrome to try and find out.
I never actually thought of googling “the WordPress Plugin’s class without the hyphens and append “wordpress plugin” to the end.
I’ll try that next time.
thanks so much andy for this helpful tip…this will realy help me as a starter :thumbs up: 🙂
Nice idea, i was reaching searching for this tips to checking my competitors Plugin, and it worked! Thanks Andy.
Very helpful post. I just detected plugin used by my competition. Thanks for sharing such a simple method.
There are much easier ways. One of them is to use http://scanwp.net.
In the meanwhile there a lot of WordPress plugin detector tools. My favorite tool is https://inspectwp.com/en/wordpress-plugin-detector .