My Codeless Website App Detects Site Builder Tools

My Codeless Website is a new tool that detects if a site was built using a website builder. The app can detect more than 50 different tools that people use to create sites, including WordPress-powered ones like Beaver Builder, Elementor, and Divi, as well as Drupal, Squarespace, Shopify, Wix, and others. It was built using PHP and an AJAX call to fetch the website builder. The app’s detection capabilities extend to site builder tools that represent more than 2 billion websites, as measured by Built With.

After speaking with the app’s creators, who are based in Utrecht, I encouraged them to add Gutenberg to the list. The site is designed to be used by people who spot a cool website and want to quickly see what tool was used to build it.

One place to find inspiring WordPress sites is the Websites category of the Webby Awards for 2021. In the Government & Civil Innovation category, WhiteHouse.gov won with its Gutenberg-powered site. The State of Tennessee COVID-19 Dashboard, another WordPress site nominated in the category, also used the block editor for its builder. Checking back through the WordPress-powered nominees and winners, nearly every one has a site that was built using Gutenberg. I did not find one page builder among them. This seems to indicate that most of the sites recognized with Webby awards for excellence on the web are building their designs on top of the block editor.

In 2014, we featured a service called What Theme that detects WordPress, Ghost, Drupal, and Shopify templates. It was later moved to be maintained by CodeinWP. At that time, the main thrust of a design came through a site’s theme and its options. Over the past seven years, plugins have played an increasingly more important role in how WordPress users create their website designs, whether it’s page builders or block libraries. Simply checking for a theme will no longer give you the full picture.

My Codeless Website is a handy tool worth bookmarking that enables you to check through a list of sites quickly to see what site builders they are using. It’s meant to appeal to entrepreneurs who need to take their businesses online so the rest of the site is geared towards client services. It would be valuable if this tool or another new tool could expand to detect the block plugins and libraries that a site is using so that visitors could get even more information on the website they find inspiring.