One of our users recently inquired about how to determine which WordPress version they were using. You might require this information to check if your website is up to date at times. We’ll show you how to quickly determine which WordPress version you’re using in this article.
The first step is to log into your WordPress site’s administration section. Scroll to the bottom of the dashboard page.
The line ‘Thanks for producing using WordPress’ can be found. You’ll see the WordPress version number next to it.
You can also find your WordPress version number under the At a Glance admin widget on the same dashboard page.
WordPress version 5.6.2 is shown in the screenshot above. This is the most straightforward method for determining which WordPress version you’re using.
If the WordPress version information isn’t available in the dashboard, there are a few different options.
Almost every website’s WordPress version may be found this way.
It’s possible that you won’t be able to see the version information in the WordPress admin area in some instances.
- It’s possible that your developer has disabled version information in the admin section.
- It’s possible that you don’t have Administrator access to the admin area.
- You’re only looking for the WordPress version of a website that you don’t own or control.
We’ll assume you don’t have FTP access to your website and can’t enter the WordPress admin area.
Please keep in mind that these techniques might not work on all websites. To safeguard their websites from frequent attacks, some security-conscious website owners suppress this information.
Having said that, below are some of the strategies you can use to determine a website’s WordPress version.
Method 1: Search the source code for the Generator tag.
Simply open a browser window and go to the website. Select View Page Source from the browser menu by right-clicking on any vacant space on the screen.
This will open the source code of the website in the browser window. Press CTRL+F and type ‘generator’ into the search box.
If it’s a WordPress site and the owner hasn’t disabled version information, you’ll see a tag that looks like this:
<meta name=”generator” content=”WordPress 4.4.2″ />
WordPress uses this meta tag to indicate that a site was built with WordPress. Due to the fact that many site owners remove the WordPress version number, this tag may not appear on all WordPress sites.
Method 2: Viewing the readme.html file
In the website’s root folder, each WordPress installation includes a readme.html page. You can view this file by appending readme.html to the end of the site’s URL, unless the site owner has disabled access to it.
http://www.example.com/readme.html
The WordPress version will be shown on top of the readme file.
If a site is protected by the Sucuri firewall, this method may not work.
Method 3: Viewing the WordPress Login Screen’s Source Code
The source code of the WordPress login screen also contains information that reveals the WordPress version of a website.
This strategy, however, will only work if the WordPress site owner hasn’t used.htaccess to disable access to the login page or admin area.
Simply add wp-login.php to the URL of a WordPress site.
http://www.example.com/wp-login.php
Right-click any vacant space on the screen as the website loads. From the browser menu, choose View Page Source.
This will access the source code for the login screen. Search for’ver=’ with CTRL+F. The version parameter has been added to stylesheets, which you will notice. This is how it would look:
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<link rel='stylesheet' id='buttons-css' href='https://www.example.com/wp-includes/css/buttons.min.css?ver=4.4.2' type='text/css' media='all' /><link rel='stylesheet' id='dashicons-css' href='https://www.example.com/wp-includes/css/dashicons.min.css?ver=4.4.2' type='text/css' media='all' /><link rel='stylesheet' id='login-css' href='https://www.example.com/wp-admin/css/login.min.css?ver=4.4.2' type='text/css' media='all' /> |
Find out which version of the plugin you’re using.
The simplest approach to figure out which plugin version you have is to go to the plugins page in the WordPress admin area.
For each plugin installed on your WordPress site, you’ll be able to view the plugin version below the plugin name.
If you don’t have access to the admin area, though, your chances of learning about a plugin’s version are minimal.
Some plugins, such as All in One SEO, add version information to a site’s source code automatically. You can view the page source by visiting a website, right-clicking in an empty area, and selecting View page source from the browser menu.
AIOSEO’s tag might be something like this:
Other plugins load CSS or JavaScript files, and they may append the plugin’s version number to script or stylesheet URLs in the following format:
This is not a valid technique of determining the version number of a plugin. The version number could, for example, be the version number of the jQuery script that a plugin is loading.
Another technique to figure out the plugin version is to look at the readme file on the plugin’s website. If you know the name of the plugin’s directory, you can look at the readme.txt file.
If a site has the free version of WPForms installed, for example, you can read the readme file as follows:
http://www.example.com/wp-content/plugins/wpforms-lite/readme.txt
If a site is protected by the Sucuri firewall, this method may not work.
That’s all there is to it; we hope this post has taught you how to determine which WordPress version you’re using.
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