How to find out what CMS a website uses

Published November 11, 2026 by Hill Country Bots

You found a site you like, a competitor just relaunched, or a prospect's site looks dated and you want to know what it runs on before you pitch. Whatever the reason, finding the content management system (CMS) behind a website usually takes under a minute. Most platforms leave clear fingerprints in the page source, the response headers or their file paths. Here are five ways to read them, from quickest to most thorough.

The short answer

1. Paste the address into a free lookup tool like BuiltWith or Wappalyzer.
2. Or open the page source and search for the tells in the table below, like wp-content for WordPress or cdn.shopify.com for Shopify.
3. Check the response headers if the source is clean.
4. For a list of sites, use a bulk detector instead of checking one by one.

1. Look at the page source

In most browsers, right click the page and choose View Page Source, or press Ctrl+U (Cmd+Option+U on a Mac). Then search the source with Ctrl+F for these strings:

The generator tag is a line near the top that looks like <meta name="generator" content="...">. When it is there, it often names the version too. Many site owners remove it for security, so do not stop if it is missing. The file paths are much harder to hide, because the site needs them to load its images, styles and scripts.

2. What this looks like on real sites

We checked a few well known public sites on November 11, 2026, reading only their homepage HTML and headers. Here is what gave each one away:

Allbirds is the useful lesson. The obvious signs were hidden, but the store still had to load its theme files from Shopify's CDN. Check the file paths before you give up.

3. Check the response headers

Headers are the notes a server sends along with a page. To see them, open your browser's developer tools (F12), go to the Network tab, reload, click the first request and read the Response Headers. If you are comfortable with a terminal, curl -sI https://example.com prints them in one line.

Look for server, x-powered-by, x-generator and link. A link header pointing to /wp-json/ means WordPress. Hosted builders like Squarespace often name themselves in the server header. A server header of cloudflare only tells you the site sits behind Cloudflare's network, not what CMS it runs, so go back to the source in that case.

4. Use a free lookup tool

If you would rather not read code, free lookup tools do the matching for you. BuiltWith and Wappalyzer both offer free single site lookups and browser extensions, and W3Techs has a simple lookup page. They check thousands of fingerprints at once, including analytics, payment and hosting services, not just the CMS. Their paid plans for checking lists start around $250 to $295 a month, which is worth it for sales teams that also want company data.

5. Check a whole list of websites at once

Agencies and sales teams often need the CMS for hundreds of sites, for example to find every Wix site in a city or every store still on an old platform. Checking those one at a time is slow. We built the Tech Stack Detector on Apify for this: paste a list of sites and get one row per site with the CMS, ecommerce platform, frameworks, server, CDN and analytics. It costs $0.50 per 1,000 sites, and sites that fail to load are free. Here is part of a real row from a November 11 run:

{
  "url": "https://wordpress.org/",
  "statusCode": 200,
  "cms": "WordPress",
  "server": "Nginx",
  "technologies": [
    { "name": "WordPress", "categories": ["CMS", "Blogs"], "version": "7.2" },
    { "name": "PHP", "categories": ["Programming languages"] }
  ],
  "status": "ok"
}

More detail, sample results and an honest comparison with the bigger tools are on our check what technology a website uses page.

When the CMS stays hidden

Sometimes none of this works, and that tells you something too. Common reasons:

• Headless CMS. The content lives in a system like Contentful or Sanity, and a separate front end, often Next.js, builds the pages. You will see the framework, not the CMS.
• Custom build. Some sites have no CMS at all, just code written for that business.
• Deliberate hiding. Security plugins can strip generator tags and rename folders.
• A CDN in front. Cloudflare and similar networks replace the original server headers.

Stick to public information. Reading the HTML and headers your browser already downloads is fine. Trying admin logins or probing private paths is not.

Questions

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