How-to · 7 min read
How to check a website's tech stack
Every website is built from a "tech stack" — the platform it runs on, the theme or framework behind its design, the apps and tools bolted on, and the fonts and colours that give it its look. Being able to read that stack is genuinely useful: for competitive research, for deciding what to build yourself, or just to satisfy curiosity about a site you admire. Here's how to check any site's stack, layer by layer.
Layer 1: the platform
Start with the foundation — what the site is actually built on. Shopify, WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, BigCommerce, or a custom build. This shapes everything else, because each platform has its own ecosystem of themes and apps. The fastest way is to run the site through a detector, which reads the platform's fingerprints from the page and tells you in seconds. Knowing the platform frames how you read every layer below it.
Check any site's stack
Platform, theme, apps, and design — in one scan.
Layer 2: the theme or design framework
Once you know the platform, the next layer is the design foundation. On Shopify that's the theme; on WordPress it's the theme too; on other platforms it might be a template or a custom front-end. Detecting this tells you whether the site used an off-the-shelf design (which you could buy too) or invested in something custom. A named theme means you can get 80% of that look by using the same one; a custom result means they built their own, which is a signal of investment.
Layer 3: the apps and tools
This is the richest layer. The apps a site runs — reviews, email capture, analytics, chat, upsells — reveal how it actually operates. Scan for these and you're reading the site's operational playbook: how it collects leads, proves trust, and tracks visitors. For a store especially, the app stack tells you more about the business than the design does. Most customer-facing tools leave a public trace, so a good detector surfaces them automatically.
Layer 4: fonts and colours
The final layer is the visual identity — the specific fonts and colour palette. This matters if you're studying design or building a brand and want to understand the choices behind a look you like. A fonts-and-colours scan reads these straight from the site's stylesheets, filtering out the noise, so you get the real typefaces and hex codes in seconds.
Read a site top-down: platform first, then design, then apps, then visual identity. Each layer explains the next.
The manual way, for the curious
Everything above can also be done by hand through your browser. Right-click any page and choose "View page source" to see the raw code, where platform fingerprints, app scripts, and font references all live. "Inspect" lets you click a specific element to see its exact fonts and colours. It's slower and you need to know what you're looking for, but it's the same information a detector reads automatically — and a good way to verify a surprising result.
Why bother checking a stack?
Three common reasons. Competitive research: understand exactly how a rival is built and operated, so you can spot what to adopt. Build decisions: see what platform and tools the sites you admire use before choosing your own. Curiosity and learning: reverse-engineering good sites is one of the fastest ways to learn how the web is built. Whatever the reason, reading a stack turns a website from a black box into an open book.
The quickest route
You don't need to do all four layers by hand. Scan the site once and you get the platform, theme, apps, fonts, and colours together — the whole stack in a single view. Start there, and drop into the browser's view-source only when you want to verify or dig deeper into one specific detail.
Keep reading: what platform a website is built on, or how to tell if a site is Shopify or WordPress.