Have you ever stumbled across an awesome website or blog and wondered if it was built using WordPress and if a stock theme was used? Yep, I thought so. You’re not alone. We all do it. The grass always looks greener on someone else’s website, so we are on an never ending path of finding WordPress themes and plugins.
Back in 2011 a little website called What WP Theme is That? was launched. This simple, but super cool website allows you to quickly locate the theme of any WordPress website and figure out which WordPress developer created it. It will also tell you if a framework is used (like my beloved Genesis) and if plugins can be identified. It won’t show all plugins, but it will show some of them and it will link over to the plugin’s page on the WordPress.org repository.
From the website you can discover some hidden gems in both WordPress designers and in plugins that you may or may not have known about.
Samples of What You Can Discover
- BBC America – Custom theme that runs on the Thematic framework.
- Katty Perry – Custom theme using Google Analyticator, Wordfence, W3 Total Cache, and Rpx for social integration.
- Rollin Stones – Custom theme using Google Analytics for WordPress.
The website also provides some information on top plugins and top themes, although it does mix themes and frameworks under one bucket. Genesis (my baby) is at the top with 7.73% of searches. It’s rival Thesis is fourth with 4.52% of searches. What surprises me is ThemeForest comes in third with 5.02% of searches. Given the popularity of ThemeForest, I would have imagined that to be a much higher amount.
Another Quick Trick
Another trick for discovering a website’s themes and plugins is to review the source code of a given website and use your browser’s find feature to search for words like “plugin”. Similar to the above tool, it won’t show all plugins, but you can see some plugins, the WordPress theme name, and get some competitive information.
The next time you’re hunting around for design inspiration and stumble upon an amazing website, don’t forget this handy little website and tool.
WP Theme Detector is another site that will do the same thing. Thanks for sharing this one as I had not seen it before.
Thanks for sharing this info Tom. For those of you interested, the tool Tom referenced above is found at http://www.wpthemedetector.com.
Hi Rebecca,
Thanks for including the link to our site WPThemeDetector (and thanks Tom for pointing it out). I just wanted to let you know that, in addition to the Top Theme Providers and Top Plugins reports, we also have a new detailed and dynamically generated Top WordPress Themes report, on which you can follow the statistical evolution of the individual themes which are most frequently detected by our tool.
Our report http://www.wpthemedetector.com/top-wordpress-themes/ lists individual themes rather than providers. For example, at this moment Genesis is number 1 as usual (our tool also tells you it´s a framework), but among the top 25 themes you´ll also find a couple of its child themes by StudioPress: eleven40 Child Theme is #12 and News Child Theme is #21 (and our tool tells you they are child themes, too).
Our users are also informed about each theme being free or premium as well as the percentage of sites that are using it, and they can follow the evolution of the statistical metrics over time.
Some more interesting features will be added very soon to our reports, so keep an eye on our site because you´re going to like them ;).
Luis I appreciate you stopping by and adding the the blog post. Your information is great and we’re looking forward to seeing more features.