What is a Tech Stack and Why Does It Matter?
A "tech stack" is the combination of programming languages, frameworks, CMS platforms, hosting services and analytics tools that power a website. Knowing the tech stack of your competitors — or your own site — helps you understand performance ceilings, hidden costs, security risks and growth limits. Our free website tech stack checker instantly detects what platform, framework and tracking tools any public website is using, no signup required.
Popular CMS Platforms in India — WordPress vs Shopify vs Custom
India's web ecosystem is dominated by a few platforms, each with very different cost and capability profiles:
- WordPress (~43% of all websites globally) — easy to launch, plugin-rich, but heavy and frequently targeted by hackers. Maintenance is real work.
- Shopify — fastest path to an online store, but ₹2,000+/month plus 0.5–2% transaction fees eat into D2C margins.
- Wix & Squarespace — drag-and-drop convenience, but capped on SEO, speed and customisation. You don't truly own the site.
- Webflow — beautiful design control, but locked-in hosting.
- Custom Built (React/Next.js, Vue, custom Node/PHP) — best performance, full ownership, infinitely scalable. Higher upfront cost, lower long-term cost.
How to Choose the Right Tech Stack for Indian Businesses
The right stack depends on three things: budget, growth plans, and team capability. A single-location bakery in Pune doesn't need a custom React stack. But a D2C brand in Mumbai planning ₹5 crore revenue in year two absolutely shouldn't lean on Shopify Lite. In our experience the answer almost always reduces to: start with what's right for the next 18 months, not the next 18 days.
WordPress vs Custom — Which is Better for Indian SMBs?
This is the most common question we get. Short answer: WordPress is great below 5,000 monthly visitors and a fixed feature set. Above that — or if you have unique workflows, integrations, or speed-sensitive customers — custom wins on every metric: 3–5× faster load times, near-zero plugin conflicts, far fewer security patches, and lower total cost of ownership over 3 years.
Use the website cost calculator to compare investment levels, then explore all our free tools at /free-tools. Curious whether you also need a mobile app? Try the app quiz.
How accurate is this tech stack detector?
The detector reads the public HTML and response headers of a URL and looks for well-known fingerprints (file paths, script names, meta generator tags, server headers). For most production sites this is highly accurate — WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Webflow and Next.js leave very obvious signals. Heavily customised sites or sites behind aggressive bot protection may show "Custom Built / Unknown" — which is itself useful information.