What Version of WordPress Am I Running?

It may seem a silly thing, but for various reasons you may not be aware of what version of WordPress your are running on a particular website. Maybe you’ve taken over a site built by someone else. Or you are rebooting your own site that’s been neglected for awhile. Or maybe you are just being confronted by the seemingly ever-present ‘Please update now’ message in the WordPress admin.

Regardless of why, sometimes you need to look up what version of WordPress you are running, and the admin itself surprisingly doesn’t have the version listed anywhere. Here are some ways to look it up:

• Admin Dashboard: This should suffice for most instances — on the admin Dashboard screen (usually the landing page when you login to the admin), look at the bottom of the Right Now widget. There should be text reading ‘You are using WordPress x.x.x’. If the Right Now widget is hidden, reveal it using the ‘Screen Options’ tab to the upper right of the screen.
• Version.php: The WordPress core stores the version as a variable in /wp-includes/version.php. You can’t access this from the front-end, but you can go into the files and look at the code to find it.
• Source Code: Some themes include the version in a meta tag in the source code. Look for

    <meta name="generator" content="WordPress 4.1" />

Incidentally, you don’t really want that tag displaying in your site code if you can help it since it can be a liability especially of you are running an out of date version of WP. Use a remove_action in your functions.php to remove that from your site.

remove_action('wp_head', 'wp_generator');