Download websites that use MODX

About MODX

Most content management systems that reach this size do so by becoming the default choice somewhere. MODX reached it by being the deliberate choice of developers who did not want a default. Released in 2004 as a PHP platform under a GPL v2 license, it hands templating, URL structure and content modelling back to the person building the site instead of imposing conventions, which is why it collected agencies and freelancers rather than casual users.

The geography is the first thing worth noticing. As of October 2026 we detect MODX on 12,673 sites, of which 8,317 sit in Russia, and .ru carries a matching share of the domain mix. A platform whose documentation, forums and freelance market take root in one language community tends to stay inside it, and the distribution in our data is what that pattern looks like once it has had time to settle. Regional density of this kind is not a footnote for anyone doing outreach, because it decides which language the campaign has to be written in before anything else is decided.

Because the CMS is installed on the customer's own server rather than delivered as a service, version state is visible, and it is fragmented. We currently see 19 distinct versions in use, clustered around 2.4. Self-hosted software ages in place: an agency ships a site, the retainer ends, and the install keeps running whatever it was built on until something breaks badly enough to force a decision. For vulnerability research, upgrade outreach or migration sales, the version column is the one that carries the signal, because it separates sites under active maintenance from sites that have simply been left running.

Version detection is inferential and incomplete, and the limits matter more than the totals. We read the release from fingerprints the platform exposes in its own output, so installations that strip those signals, sit behind a full-page cache or serve pre-rendered output will report no version or drop out of the count altogether. Both the site total and the version breakdown should be read as floors. A missing version does not mean an old install, and an old version does not by itself mean an exploitable one.

What presence on a domain does imply is a specific kind of buyer. Someone paid for a custom build rather than assembling a site from a template, and behind that build sits a PHP runtime, a database and a server that somebody has to keep alive, which in turn means hosting spend, maintenance spend and eventually a redesign decision. Hosting companies, security vendors, plugin and integration sellers, and competing platforms all want that population as a whole rather than one domain at a time.

A lookup tells you what a single company runs, and there are free tools for that. The export tells you how a self-hosted CMS is distributed across countries, top-level domains and versions at the same moment, which is the only practical way to size a migration campaign, scope a support offering in the right language, or isolate the slice of an install base that has not been touched in years.