Download websites that use Cecil

About Cecil

Nothing from Cecil is running when you load a page it made. A static site generator does its work on a laptop or in a build pipeline, turns Markdown and templates into finished HTML, and then leaves. What arrives in the browser is plain files that a web server hands over without interpreting anything, which is why the approach is fast and why it has so little attack surface. The generator is visible to us only because it signs its output, stamping a marker into the pages it writes.

The stamp has a consequence worth understanding before reading any figure on this page. A signature baked at build time records the state of the machine that published the site, at the moment it last published. If a site was generated once and never touched again, our record freezes there while the project keeps releasing. A detection is therefore evidence about a publishing workflow rather than about anything live, and it dates the last deploy rather than the site.

Version spread is more interesting here than it would be for a server or a CMS. We currently see 26 distinct releases across the sites where a version is readable, with 8.85.3 the one we record most often at the moment. A generator with that many builds in the wild is one shipping frequently, and the spread is a direct picture of publishing cadence in its user base: sites rebuilt on every content change track the current release, sites rebuilt once a year sit wherever they last landed. Where a database driven CMS shows you which installations are behind on security patches, a generator like this one shows you which projects are still actively published at all.

As of October 2026 the Cecil fingerprint appears on 29 sites. The number is small in the way that developer tooling numbers are always small, and it also undercounts, because the marker can be switched off in configuration and a site built on a custom template may never emit it. Anyone running a static generator to strip weight out of their pages is exactly the kind of operator who might strip the generator tag too.

The population behind those domains has a coherent shape. Cecil is written in PHP and released under the MIT license, an unusual combination in a field where the better known generators come out of the JavaScript, Go and Ruby worlds. Choosing a PHP generator usually means the surrounding competence is already there: agencies and developers who have spent years in that ecosystem, who have hosting and deployment habits built around it, and who wanted static output without changing toolchains. Hosting companies, headless content platforms and component vendors would want to reach exactly those developers, and finding them any other way is hard, because none of them are buying anything that leaves a trail.

A per-domain lookup tells you how one site was built. The downloadable list is what the questions above actually need, since every one of them is a question about a set: which sites publish with this generator, which releases they are stuck on, what they run alongside it, and how the group changed between one snapshot of our data and the next.