As a developer, you might want to emulate a website with a beautiful theme and effective functionality. However, if you don’t know which tools that website is using, it can be difficult to apply those features to your client’s site.
Fortunately, there are a few easy ways you can identify a website’s theme and other tools. By learning this information, you can implement just the right theme, plugin, or third-party extension on your client’s website, improving its user experience and design.
In this post, we’ll discuss why you might want to discover the tools being used on a website. Then we’ll show you how to do this using three different methods. Let’s get started!
Whether you browse the WordPress Directories or third-party platforms such as ThemeForest, there are thousands of ways you can customize a website. Since you can choose from many available themes and plugins, it can be difficult to find the most effective options.
One way to solve this problem is by taking inspiration from a website you like. You can identify the specific theme, plugin, or extension that was used in its development, in order to implement specific desired features on the website you’re building.
If you admire a website’s functionality, that could be a result of its theme. You might want to use the same one to improve user experience, increase speed, or add extra security. Also, applying a theme with lightweight coding can be the key to making a website mobile-friendly.
Similarly, plugins add many types of useful features to WordPress websites. When viewing a feature on the front end of a website, however, you might not know how it was implemented. This is when you’d consider using a tool to identify the site’s plugins.
Finally, you might want to pinpoint the website’s third-party extensions. Some sites use particular Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), externally-hosted JavaScript, security tools, or advertising networks. Identifying these elements can help you improve the performance, security, and functionality of your clients’ websites.
Once you find a website you admire, it’s time to discover which tools were used during its development. Let’s discuss the various ways you can identify WordPress themes, plugins, and third-party extensions from a website’s front end.
1. Check the source code
One method of identifying the tools WordPress websites use is by looking at the source code. First, navigate to the website you want to evaluate. Then, right-click on the page and choose View Page Source:
This will open the source code in a new tab. If you want to identify the theme, you’ll need to search for style.css:
On some websites, the theme name will be listed after “id=”. However, you can also access advanced information
[…]
This article was written by Will Morris and originally published on ManageWP.