Meet Remco
My name is Remco Nieuwenhuizen, I’ve been in the WordPress space since 2008 when I started building websites in the evenings after my day job at the army. I just had my mission to Afghanistan and while that was great I made the decision during the mission that my career was not in the army. So after I came back I started googling how to make money online. And I created my first affiliate site about road cycling where I earned my first online money. Since then I have created multiple WordPress websites and webshops, sold many of these websites, started a webdesignbureau and later a WordPress maintenance company. And right now WPoptic.com is my main focus for growth.
What inspired you to create WPoptic?
In my WordPress maintenance company I work with a lot of website owners who want to stay on top of their game. I often get the question: “Do you know what plugin this is?”, and then me or my team was digging inside the inspector tools to search for css names that could show which plugin was used. This sparked the idea to create something that could show in a millisecond what plugins are used on a website. The idea was born.
Who is WPoptic primarily designed for—developers, marketers, or general users?
WPoptic was first built for myself and our team, but we quickly realized that more WordPress enthusiasts wanted to use this tool. So we created a Browser extension and uploaded it to the webstore. And right now, 1 year later, we are at around 1100 daily users that uncover plugins on around 15000 websites daily.
So the extension is for everybody that wants to know more about WordPress.
The platform WPoptic.com is a place where we share plugin insights. How many installations of a plugin we have found, on which top level domains, in what areas around the world etc. We want to become the Wappalyzer or Builtwith of the WordPress industry.
What was the biggest motivation behind helping users “see what’s behind” a WordPress site?
That was personal, I worked so many years on other websites that I had the feeling that I wanted to create something for myself again. It was in the summer of 2024 when I spoke to a business coach who helped me reveal some insights about me, my companies and my future that created the motivation to build something big. Within the WordPress space there are not many things left that I don’t know (although I still learn everyday). But building a platform like WPoptic is something that I find “higher computer science”. There are a lot of things that I need to learn and I get really motivated to step outside of my comfort zone of the WordPress space and still create something that is WordPress related.
What do you think makes WPoptic stand out from other “site analyzer” tools?
There are a lot of site analyzer tools that are great. For example, built with detects over 100.000 technologies and Wappalyzer over 5000 technologies. But in the WordPress space, they only detect around 500(builtwith) and 200(Wappalyzer) plugins, so these big platforms don’t have WordPress as their priority.
In the WordPress directory are already 50.000+ WordPress plugins. So there was a big gap to be filled.
And we did a plugin detector test (https://wpoptic.com/blog/the-best-wordpress-plugin-detector/) last month on our blogpage with eleven other WordPress site analyzers.
We think that speed, accuracy and the percentage of plugins found are important pillars to do the test with.
WPoptic scored on all 3 pillars better than the competition. But there is still a lot of room left for improvement.
How do you handle sites that try to hide or obfuscate their technology stack?
Good question, we’re aware that some websites try to hide or obfuscate their technology stack.
However, our detection system doesn’t rely on a single method like file paths or headers. We use multiple intelligent signals, such as unique code patterns, script handles, and CSS identifiers that are hard to disguise completely. This allows us to still identify many plugins and technologies even when they’re partially hidden.
Of course, if a website is heavily customized or uses advanced obfuscation, detection can become limited. In those cases, WPoptic simply reports what can be verified with confidence, we’d rather show 90% accurate data than 100% guesses.
Our goal isn’t to expose sites, but to provide transparent and useful insights for research, competitive analysis, and the WordPress community.
What excites you most about the SaaS space right now?
Well we can’t ignore AI of course, this week ChatGPT Atlas launched and I don’t like it (yet), but we see how the future of the internet evolves. In a couple of years from now computers and online solutions will work for themselves and do jobs independently instead of us as a user giving it every command.
For the Saas industry this opens a lot of opportunities. It is as if we relive the start of the internet again. And while I’m not creating an AI tool I definitely use it to speed up certain processes. What took a full time employee and 1 month of hard work 1 year ago can now cost me a simple prompt and some hours to let AI do the work for me.
So yes it is sometimes scary but most of all exciting times in the SaaS and internet space.
What advice would you give to someone looking to build a successful SaaS tool for the WordPress ecosystem?
Work with the right people that fully understand the project and who are capable of creating it. Last year I worked with a freelancer who, at first sight, was a good match. He created the first lines of code for WPoptic and got us the first users. But when I wanted to double down and move forward, I noticed that he didn’t have the right skills to move forward.
I asked for a second opinion from another developer because like I said earlier, this project is higher level computer science for me, I couldn’t review the code fully to understand if it was great or mediocre. But when he looked at the code his first reaction was “oh ooooh”, I knew enough. We needed to start from scratch again but it took the project to another level.
So working with the right people from the start will help you, in the end it will save you a lot of money.
Yes, right now we are developing the export tool of the website. This means you can use our database to find websites using a certain WordPress stack.
Of course we are also improving our detection. We are planning to give a large update by the end of this year. Which will hopefully increase our plugin detection from 20.000 plugins to 50.000 plugins. Which is basically the whole WordPress plugin directory. And improve the detection rate by a lot.
Lastly, we want to add plugin history to the website. So we can show if the plugin installation is increasing or decreasing. Lastly, if there are any other data points that are interesting to some users we ask you to let us know.
Did you enjoy our interview? Do you have anything to say to our community?
Yes, it’s great that a platform like SaaSPirate is giving founders and developers the opportunity to showcase their project to a large audience. Every beginning is hard for an entrepreneur and you need to be in front of your audience to grow. So I’m very grateful that I got the opportunity. If anyone has questions about WPoptic or wants to connect with me on Linkedin. I will answer each and every one of you.
