Curious to know what technologies are used on your competitor’s website?

If you have ever wondered how to find what technology is used on the particular website.

Let me tell you; you are not the only one.

Probably, there are three reasons you would like to know what’s that site running

First is a curiosity to learn how to find and to understand what are the technologies are used to build that website.

Second, you are IT security professional and doing surveillance.

Third, you are doing market research.

There are many free online site reporting tools available, which let you know email address behind a website, what operating system, web server, web technologies are being used.

Let me show you my favorite lists.

Netcraft

Netcraft Site Report is probably one of the oldest tools in the market, which helps you in finding various useful information as following.

• Background – first seen, title, ranking, language, description
• Network – IPv4/IPv6 address, domain registrar, network owner, hosting country
• SSL/TLS – vulnerability status like POODLE, heart bleed, SSL cert details, protocol negotiation, public key, certificate type & chain details
• Hosting – who host the website
• SPF details
• Security – risk rating, block list
• Site technologies – CDN, CMS, software, RSS, compression, character encoding

and much more…

Built With

Built With online Internet research tool is quite impressive to let you know technologies are used to make a website and it also provides you related technology trend statistics in a beautiful chart.

Along with technologies, it also let you know if any advertising is used. Interesting to see how it track the website at the broader level to reveal each component. Go ahead and try yourself to believe.

W3 Techs

W3 Techs Site Info tool let you know following detailed information in tabular format.

• Popularity ranking
• CMS used like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc
• Programming language used like PHP, Node.js, javascript, etc
• Markup
• Character encoding
• Image file formats
• Site elements – external CSS, inline CSS,
• Compression, SPDY, HTTP/2, HSTS, SSL cert details,
• Analytics, Web server, analytics, reverse proxy details

and at the end, you will get technology score based on popularity and traffic.

WAPPALYZER

Wappalyzer is a browser extension available for Firefox or Chrome which will detect the technologies behind the website and show the details.

So it’s probably the easiest one to install the extensions and visit the site to see what’s running on it.

Similar Tech

I am not sure how it’s calculated, but SimilarTech gives technologies score and lists out like an advertisers.com.ng, analytics, widget, social sharing, mobile, CDN, CMS, media, open graph, schema and meta tags details.

You may also install their extensions in the browser for quick website profiling.

ALLORA

Simple but easy way to find out technologies stack used on a particular website with ALLORA.

What CMS

WhatCMS doesn’t give you all technologies but just which CMS is being used like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Blogger and 138 more.

Allora

Allora let you find your customer by analyzing competitors technologies used on any website. Allora provides daily updates for top 1,000,000 websites.

Once you understand the technology, go ahead and learn them to make it similar or better.

I hope above tools help you find the technology stack behind any website for your research, curiosity or just fun!