Download websites that use GOV.UK Elements

About GOV.UK Elements

The UK Government Digital Service did something unusual for a public body. It published its front-end code openly under MIT, so anyone could lift the form controls, the typography scale and the layout rules that gave GOV.UK services their look. Plenty of people outside government did exactly that. A detection hit should be read accordingly, because a page carrying GOV.UK Elements is a page that adopted a government-authored component library, which is not the same thing as a government page.

GOV.UK Elements dates from 2014 and is mostly CSS, and both facts point the same direction. A component set of that vintage was superseded inside its own design program, first by consolidated element libraries and then by the GOV.UK Frontend package that carries the standard today. The library therefore works as a dating stamp. Where a service still serves these stylesheets, the front end has not been rebuilt across a full generation of the standard, whatever the content sitting on top of it looks like.

The practical consequence is an accessibility one. Later revisions of the same design lineage folded in fixes for focus states, error summaries, contrast and screen reader behavior that the earlier components did not have. A service running the old library is not automatically failing an audit, but it is running a version of the government's own guidance that the government stopped shipping, and an auditor who knows the lineage knows which checks to run first.

As of October 2026 we detect GOV.UK Elements on 9 sites, and the figure is a floor rather than a census. Detection needs the library to arrive as a recognizable file. Teams who compile the stylesheets into a single bundle, rename the output or vendor the source into an internal package leave nothing for a signature to catch, and that packaging was ordinary practice among precisely the teams that were using it. We also hold no country breakdown and no version history for this entry, so any claim about where the remaining installations sit would be invention.

The people who care about the full list are auditing accessibility, bidding for public-sector maintenance work, or studying how long a retired standard survives in production. A per-domain lookup answers one narrow question, whether a service you already suspect is running the old components. The downloadable set answers the inverse and harder one, which is which organizations across the whole crawl still sit on that generation, without you having to name any of them first. For a migration pipeline or a supply audit, the second question is the one with money attached.