How to Discover Which CMS is Used on a Website - Top 6 Online CMS Detector Tools

A content management system (CMS) is a system used to manage the content of a website or blog. Many people use CMS to more easily manage the content of their website or blog. Have you ever wondered which CMS a site is using? If you like any website, you could easily discover the CMS behind it. In addition, if you're a professional, it might just so happen that a client of yours could ask which CMS their competitors are using or which CMS a website they would like you to design their own like, use.

This brings us to CMS Detectors. With these special tools you can find and detect which CMS any website or group of websites are using. CMS Detectors can recognise hundreds of the most popular and famous CMS(es). Of course there are some more basic (and crude) ways you or anyone else could use to find the CMSes which are running websites, including:

1. Check the footer or sidebar for a "Powered By" logo.
2. See the favicon image in your browser address bar (although some types of CMS like Kentico allow easily changing the favicon).
3. Search for “Login-link” or try a default login link to the CMS (e.g. for Ektron: www.example.com/login.aspx or www.example.com/cmslogin.aspx or for Drupal: www.example.com/?q=user)
4. Look for the “Designed by” link and check out the designer website – they might often openly speak about the CMS they use

Why CMS Detectors

Despite discovering CMSes which run websites through the crude methods listed above, they may not always work or might be time consuming. This is why online CMS Detectors come in handy. They refine the manner in which you can discover these CMSes, and make the job of discovering CMSes easy and faster.

I searched the internet, and found on a particular website where four of these CMS detectors were tested and used to analyze websites of 11 major CMS vendors with the following results (test was done in 2011):

CMS Analyzer	Effectiveness
1). W3Techs (w3techs.com/sites)	73%
2). BuiltWith (builtwith.com)	64%
3). Wappalyzer (firefox add-on)	36%
4). CMS Detector (detectcms.com)	27%
5). CMSeye (cms.targetinfolabs.com)	27%

6 different tools for detecting CMS on websites

Online CMS detectors are really handy tools for detecting the type of Content Management Systems (CMS) on websites. They're more accurate and do not take time in accessing and showing these CMS types across the internet. The top 6 which we could find have been listed in order of increasing importance with the most powerful as #1 down in the list. They include:

6). W3Techs

Provides a comprehensive information set on the technologies used. It was the most effective tool in the test described above for identifying website CMSes. When SaibaWorld tested it recently in 2017, it appears there were much better CMS Detectors. Thus, it is listed as #6. This tool can be reached via web page or used as a bookmarklet, a browser extension or a google subscribed link.

Visit the CMS detection webpage here: W3Techs

5). Wappalyzer

Is a user-friendly browser add-on that uncovers the CMS and other technologies used on websites. It detects CMS and e-commerce systems, message boards, JavaScript frameworks, hosting panels, analytics tools and more. It shows the results straight in the address bar or in the status bar.

Visit the CMS detection webpage here: Wappalyzer (here, remember to add http:// or https:// as the case may be)

4). OnlineWebTool - CMS Detector

This tool works perfectly well for detecting CMS on various websites, however, the CMS detector has found CMS for about 30% of all its user's requests. OnlineWebTool decided that as long as this tool is popular, it has decided to continue to share statistics with the public via its CMS detector.

Visit the CMS detection webpage here: OnlineWebTool CMS Detector

3). Guess - CMS Detector

This tool will analyze websites and attempt to detect the plaform, language, framework and other technologies used for any website. No plugins or extensions are required and it works with any browser! This is an experimental service, so contact the company if any problem occurs or if you think a site has been wrongly detected.

Visit the CMS detection page here: Guess CMS Detector

2). WhatCMS

WhatCMS identifies which web publishing content manager that different sites use. Every day it visits hundreds of thousands of websites and tries to determine which tool is used. WhatCMS looks at a variety of factors within a webpage to determine what CMS a website is using, but it is admittedly not 100% accurate. WhatCMS has included algorithms for detecting all of the major CMS. This tool can currently detect the use of 192 different CMS applications and services.

Visit the CMS detection page here: WhatCMS

1). BuiltWith

This is the best CMS detector in our opinion. It represents a really powerful tool that even in its free version shows a technology profile for any given website. It would include information on:

• Server, CMS and framework used
• Analytics and tracking systems used
• Content delivery network, aggregation functionality and document information

It also provides a SEO profile with basic SEO items as Metadata, Page Keywords or Response Time. The overall SEO score is given as well (very similar system as WebsiteGrader).

Visit the CMS detection webpage here: BuiltWith