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How Does That Site Work?

September 17th, 2007 · by David Bradley

Ever wondered what was going on under the hood of your favorite websites and blogs? Well, now you can find out. BuiltWith.com lets you lift the lid and see some of the working of a site.

Is it running on a PHP, ASP, or other hosting service? Does it use Javascript? What about advertising, what scripts is the site using to monetize, Google AdSense, or something else? You can find out if the site is set up properly for autodiscovery of RSS newsfeeds too, and whether or not it proudly displays its Feedburner subscribers. Does a site use the Technorati system to make it easy for visitors to add it to their favorites? What about plugins, is it a Wordpress blog, for instance.

All of this information is readily available to anyone looking at the source of a webpage in their browser, but BuiltWith.com provides a nice executive summary. Most interesting though are the statistics about sites in general that are thrown up alongside the results for a particular site you view.

Did you know, for example, that only about 0.06% of the top 5000 sites searched display their Alexa data with a widget on the page or that almost 25% of those 5000 sites have an RSS, but just one in ten have autodiscovery enabled to allow their users to find the feed? Only 3.43% are Wordpress blogs, just 2.1% use Feedburner, and less than 10% are running Google AdSense?

It did occur to me that being able to find this kind of information so easily might open up security problems for you, but like I said, the system doesn’t reveal any private information that is not readily available in the page source, so your site is as safe as it ever was.

6 responses so far ↓

  • David Bradley // Aug 21, 2007 at 11:11 am

    Previously, I posted a who hosts this site post, which provides some additional useful information but is probably only 98% accurate.

  • Wayne Smallman // Sep 19, 2007 at 7:05 am

    There’s some interesting figures in there. Not sure if they significant figures just yet, but we’ll see shortly.

    For some reason, BuiltWith seems to think my personal website is running out of Perl. Not quite.

    I’m using that other more notable language beginning with the letter P — PHP.

    Still interesting, though…

  • David Bradley // Sep 19, 2007 at 7:12 am

    Wayne, yes, I’ve found a few flaws with this tool since writing the original post, although overall it’s worth a look

    db

  • Gary // Sep 27, 2007 at 9:21 am

    Hi,

    David thanks for posting about BuiltWith.com I am very grateful for the traffic.

    With regards to the incorrect results from the system, BuiltWith only reports what it finds. Wayne who says his site is not using Perl is completely correct, however, the server reports that perl is installed, so BuiltWith reports it to.

  • David Bradley // Sep 27, 2007 at 12:08 pm

    That’s interesting Gary, I saw a few that seemed to be erroneous, how could Wayne’s server be reporting one thing when it’s running another? Builtwith isn’t getting headers directly, I take it, but looking for specific files or calls?

    db

  • Gary // Sep 27, 2007 at 12:43 pm

    BuiltWith.com does a GET request on the page you enter in the URL box and that is it.

    My personal blog uses WordPress and PHP, but the server supports Perl (and lists that under “server information” in the right hand box).

    If you could give me the lookups that are erroneous I’d be happy to take a look at them and try and work out what is going on.

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