While working on WordPress projects, I repeatedly ran into the same practical need: understanding how an existing website was built.
Clients would share reference sites and ask about themes, plugins, or specific functionality. The answers were usually visible in the source code, but extracting them required experience, time, and a fair bit of manual effort.
For someone new to WordPress, that information was effectively inaccessible.
That gap is what led to UnmaskWP.
The Practical Problem
WordPress sites leave behind identifiable signals, in asset paths, markup patterns, and configuration hints. If you know where to look, you can usually infer:
- Whether a site is running on WordPress
- Which theme it’s using
- Which plugins are active
- How certain features are implemented
I was already doing this manually for client work. But repeating that process again and again made one thing clear: this didn’t need to be manual, and it certainly didn’t need to be technical.
Turning a Manual Process into a Tool
UnmaskWP started as an internal idea: take the common patterns used to identify WordPress themes and plugins, automate them, and present the results clearly.
The goal wasn’t to expose everything or be clever, it was to reduce friction.
Instead of inspecting source code or guessing based on UI behavior, UnmaskWP provides a straightforward way to analyze a WordPress site and surface relevant details in seconds.
From an Idea to UnmaskWP
Once the idea started taking shape, I began working on UnmaskWP with my colleague and fellow developer, Mahesh Pawar.
We set out to turn a process I had been doing manually into something much simpler: enter a website URL, analyse the publicly available signals, and present the WordPress information we can reliably identify.
That became UnmaskWP.
Rather than trying to surface as much information as possible, we’ve focused on making the results useful and understandable. UnmaskWP can help identify WordPress usage, themes, plugins, and other relevant details when those signals are publicly detectable.
As we continue working on UnmaskWP, the priorities remain straightforward: improve detection accuracy, make the results more useful, and keep the experience simple.
