Download websites that use Gridsome

About Gridsome

A static site generator is gone by the time anyone visits the site. Gridsome does its work on a build server, turning data from a headless CMS, Markdown files or an API into pre-rendered HTML, and what reaches the browser is plain markup with a JavaScript bundle for navigation. Detection depends on traces the build leaves behind rather than on any running process, because there is no running process.

The traces are enough to say something about the team. A site built this way was built by developers, deliberately, with a repository and a deployment pipeline behind it. The generator was released in 2018, sits in the Vue ecosystem and uses a GraphQL data layer, so choosing it meant choosing a particular stack at a particular moment. Sites carrying it tend to be documentation, marketing pages, developer portfolios, agency work and content sites where build-time rendering was worth the extra step. The project is MIT licensed and community driven with no vendor behind it, so adoption reflects developer preference rather than a procurement decision.

Version distribution is where the story sharpens. We see 44 distinct releases across the installs we detect, and 0.7.23 is the one that appears most often. On a build-time tool the recorded version tells you when a site was last built, not what its owner is running today. A site pinned to an older release has a pipeline that has not run in a long while, and given that community activity around the generator has slowed, a good share of the detected population is likely to be exactly that: finished sites that still work, still serve traffic, and will never be rebuilt on the same toolchain.

Frozen sites are not worthless sites. They are documentation portals, product pages and company sites that do their job without anyone touching them, which makes the population useful to anyone selling migration work, hosting, or a newer framework, and useful in a different way to anyone researching how long a JavaScript toolchain keeps serving after its community moves on.

As of September 2026 we detect Gridsome on 2,271 sites, and the figure is conservative by nature. Pre-rendered output can be stripped of generator metadata, bundled through a CDN that renames assets, or built with a configuration that leaves no distinctive markers, and the more experienced the team the more likely all of that becomes. Sites we cannot attribute are counted nowhere.

For a researcher the value lies in what a whole population supports. Adoption curves need every detected domain across successive crawls, not a spot check on one. So does the question of where sites go when a Static site generator project loses momentum, which is answered by watching domains leave one generator and reappear under another. The export lists each domain with its detected version and confirmation date, which is what makes comparison of that kind possible.