What is a CMS website, and how do you find which CMS a site uses?

What does a CMS do?

A CMS stores your content in a database and puts it into page templates. You type into a form, press publish, and the page appears with the site's design. It also manages users and permissions, media files, menus and, often, SEO settings.

Examples of CMS platforms

• WordPress. Open source and the most widely used, with thousands of themes and plugins.
• Drupal and Joomla. Open source, more technical, used by governments and large organisations.
• Craft CMS. Flexible, developer-friendly, popular with design agencies.
• Sitecore and Adobe Experience Manager. Enterprise platforms for large organisations with personalisation and multi-site needs.
• Hosted builders such as Wix, Squarespace and Webflow, which combine a CMS, hosting and design tools.
• Ecommerce platforms such as Shopify and Magento, which are CMSs built around products.
• Custom CMSs built for one website, like the admin panels we build in our dynamic website packages.

What is a headless CMS?

A headless CMS manages content but has no front end of its own. It delivers content through an API to a separately built website, app or other channel. A headless website is fast and flexible but needs developers for any design change. Contentful, Sanity and Strapi are common headless CMSs, and WordPress can also be used headless.

What is a WordPress website?

A website built on WordPress, where pages and posts are managed in the WordPress dashboard. Self-hosted WordPress (from wordpress.org) is free software that you install on your own hosting; WordPress.com is a hosted service built on it.

What is CMS in web design?

In web design, the CMS is the layer that separates content from design. Designers create templates once, and editors add content into them indefinitely without breaking the layout.

How to find which CMS a website is using

1. View the page source (right-click, View page source) and search for clues: "wp-content" means WordPress, "cdn.shopify.com" means Shopify, "squarespace" or "wix" appear in their files.
2. Look for a generator tag in the source, such as ``.
3. Try common admin addresses, such as /wp-admin for WordPress or /user/login for Drupal.
4. Use a detection tool. Free browser extensions and sites such as Wappalyzer and BuiltWith list the CMS and other technologies a site uses.

Custom-built sites, like this one, often show no CMS at all.

Static, CMS or custom: which do you need?

If you will rarely change the site, a static website is fastest and cheapest. If you will publish regularly, a CMS is worth it. If you need a specific workflow, a custom admin panel avoids plugin bloat. See static vs dynamic websites.