---
title: "About ThemeSniffer — Who Builds These Tools"
description: "Who builds ThemeSniffer and how its WordPress detection actually works: the signals we read, what the tools can and cannot see, and why every report states its own limits."
canonical_url: "https://themesniffer.com/about"
author: "Ruslan Saifullin"
source: "Generated from HTML by scripts/build-markdown.mjs — do not edit by hand."
---

# About ThemeSniffer

Who builds these tools, and how they actually work

ThemeSniffer is a small independent project built around one question: what is this website made of? It answers that with a free Chrome extension and a set of free web tools, and it tries to be honest about the difference between what it knows and what it is guessing.

## Who builds it

The extension and the tools are built and maintained by **Ruslan Saifullin**, a developer with over 10 years of WordPress experience across 20+ projects.

It started as a personal tool. Identifying the theme and plugins behind a site I admired meant opening DevTools, digging through source, and recognising patterns I had learned the slow way. That is a fine skill to have and a poor way to spend an afternoon, so it got automated — first for me, then for anyone.

You can follow the work on X at [@ruslan\_dev\_ai](https://x.com/ruslan_dev_ai), which is also the [best way to get in touch](https://themesniffer.com/contact).

## What's here

Everything on this site is free to use, with no account required:

-   **[The Chrome extension](https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/wordpress-theme-detector/jmfelpjpndlbhbpffecppfhnfjkamiaa?utm_source=about_page&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=about)** — detects the theme and plugins on whatever site you are looking at, from the toolbar.
-   **[Tech Stack Report](https://themesniffer.com/tools/wordpress-tech-stack/)** — theme, plugins, hosting, CDN and speed for any URL.
-   **[Font Detector](https://themesniffer.com/tools/wordpress-font-detector/)** — every font family, weight and source a site loads.
-   **[Color Palette Extractor](https://themesniffer.com/tools/wordpress-color-palette/)** — a site's colors with their roles, contrast, and copy-ready exports.
-   **[Is It WordPress?](https://themesniffer.com/tools/is-it-wordpress/)** — a quick verdict with a confidence level.
-   **[The blog](https://themesniffer.com/blog/)** — guides on identifying themes, finding plugins, and researching what competitors are running.

## How the detection works

There is no magic and no database of scraped sites. When you paste a URL, our server requests that page the same way your browser would, then reads what any visitor could read: the public HTML, and the stylesheets the page links to.

From that we look for signals that identify software — `/wp-content/` paths, generator meta tags, theme stylesheet headers, plugin asset paths, response headers that name a host or CDN, `@font-face` rules, CSS custom properties like `--wp--preset--color--primary` that a theme's `theme.json` generates. Each signal is matched against patterns we maintain by hand.

Nothing you check is stored. The analysis happens per request and the result goes to your browser.

## Why the reports admit what they missed

Every tool here reads a site from the outside, which sets a hard ceiling on what it can know. A server-side fetch cannot see anything JavaScript paints after load, anything drawn inside an image or canvas, or the computed result of the CSS cascade. On a stylesheet-heavy site we fetch a capped number of stylesheets rather than all of them, so results cover the highest-priority CSS.

Rather than quietly presenting a partial answer as a complete one, each report says what it covered: how many stylesheets were read, which signals fired, and where a result is inferred rather than declared. A confidence level is not decoration — it is the difference between "this site says it runs WordPress" and "this site looks like it does".

That honesty is the whole product. A detection tool that is confidently wrong is worse than no tool, because you act on it.

## Corrections

Detection patterns go stale. Themes get renamed, plugins change their asset paths, hosts change their headers. If a tool here misidentifies something you know the answer to, that is a bug worth reporting — tell me on [X](https://x.com/ruslan_dev_ai) and include the URL, and I would rather fix the pattern than have it be wrong for everyone else too.

## Privacy in one line

The site uses Google Analytics for anonymous usage statistics, and the tools do not retain the URLs you analyze. The full details are in the [Privacy Policy](https://themesniffer.com/privacy) and the [Terms of Service](https://themesniffer.com/terms).