What Recruitment Agency Websites Are Actually Built On: A 391-Site Census
WordPress runs 56% of recruitment agency websites, and only 8% use a platform built for recruitment. We fingerprinted the technology behind 391 UK and US recruitment agency sites — every agency 50 employees or fewer — from their rendered page code. This is a census, not a ranking: what the industry actually runs, how it is hosted, and whether anyone is keeping it up.
The platform census
| Platform | Share of 391 sites |
|---|---|
| WordPress | 56% |
| Custom / undetected | 23% |
| Purpose-built recruitment platform | 8% |
| Squarespace | 4% |
| Webflow | 4% |
| GoDaddy | 2% |
| Duda | 1% |
| HubSpot CMS | 1% |
| Wix | 1% |
Two figures carry most of the meaning. WordPress alone runs more of the industry than everything else combined. And the modern design-tool tier that dominates conversation is marginal here: Webflow sits at 4% and Squarespace at 4%, each running fewer sites than the recruitment-specific platforms at 8%.
The 8% on a purpose-built recruitment platform
Where a recruitment website platform was identifiable by signature, these were the names, as counts out of 391 sites:
| Platform | Sites |
|---|---|
| SourceFlow | 10 |
| Volcanic (Access) | 7 |
| Venn / Vennture | 6 |
| Shazamme | 5 |
| HotLizard | 1 |
| RecruiterWEB | 1 |
These are install counts detected in page code, not market share, and not a quality judgement — a platform whose output is indistinguishable from a custom build will be undercounted here by design. What the numbers do establish is scale: roughly 8% of small agencies have bought into a recruitment-specific website platform. The other 92% are the open market.
What "custom / undetected" actually means
Just under a quarter of sites — 23% — either are genuinely bespoke or cannot be fingerprinted from rendered markup. In practice this bucket is mostly agency-built sites: a developer or a local web studio produced a theme with the platform signatures stripped or never present.
It is worth being honest that this is the census's weakest cell. A headless build, an aggressively optimised WordPress install and a hand-rolled static site can all land here. The bucket is real, but it is a residual rather than a finding.
The infrastructure underneath
Platform choice turns out to be less revealing than what sits around it. Three figures stood out.
| Infrastructure signal | Share of 391 sites |
|---|---|
| Behind a managed host or CDN | 38% (26% Cloudflare) |
| No security headers at all | 49% |
| No cookie-consent layer | 46% |
Almost half of recruitment agency websites ship no security headers — no content-security policy, no transport-security header, none of the response headers that browsers use to constrain what a page can do. On a site that accepts CV uploads and candidate personal data, that is a more consequential gap than any platform choice on the list above.
The 46% with no cookie-consent layer matters for a different reason. Over half the sample runs analytics or advertising pixels; a meaningful number of those are running non-essential tags on UK and EU visitors with no consent mechanism in front of them. Whatever you build on, this is the cheapest thing to fix and the most exposed thing to leave.
The only serious software layer is usually the ATS
Where an applicant tracking system was visible in page code, Bullhorn and JobDiva led the sample. That is consistent with how these firms buy software: the ATS is chosen deliberately, evaluated properly and paid for annually, while the website is commissioned once and then left alone. For most agencies audited, the applicant tracking system is the only serious software layer they run, and marketing tooling barely features.
Is anyone keeping these sites up?
Platform tells you what was built. These figures tell you whether it is still alive. They are shares of the 367 sites that responded at audit time, rather than all 391.
| Signal of life | Share of responding sites |
|---|---|
| Have a live vacancies page | 66% |
| Posted a blog since 2025 | 22% |
| Have no social presence at all | 22% |
| Do not block AI crawlers | 98% |
A third of recruitment agency websites have no live vacancies page — the single piece of content that gives a recruitment site a reason to be re-visited. And barely a fifth have published anything since 2025, which means the typical agency site is a static object rather than a channel. Content freshness here is best-effort, read from machine-readable post dates, so treat it as directional.
The last row is the interesting one. 98% of sites leave AI crawlers unblocked, and yet only 7% are structured to be cited by them — the door is open and almost nothing is laid out for the visitor. We covered that gap in full in our audit of AI search visibility across the same 391 agencies.
What this census does and does not tell you
It tells you what the market runs, which is a different question from what you should buy, and the two have genuinely different answers. WordPress being the majority platform is a fact about inertia and about the supply of developers, not a recommendation — and the 27.9 out of 100 average marketing maturity across this same sample suggests the industry's collective platform choices are not producing much pipeline.
If you are choosing rather than surveying, those decisions live elsewhere: DIY vs SaaS vs bespoke for the shape of the decision, the scored builder comparison for a ranked view, the full platform guide for feature depth, and platforms under £500/month if budget is the binding constraint.
The census's real use is calibration. If you have been told your WordPress site is behind the times, it is in fact what most of your peers run. If you have been told a security header policy is a nice-to-have, half your peers agree with you, and that is the problem.
Frequently asked questions
What platform do most recruitment agencies use for their website?
WordPress, by a wide margin. It runs 56% of the 391 UK and US recruitment agency sites audited in June 2026 — more than every other detectable platform combined.
How many recruitment agencies use a purpose-built recruitment website platform?
8%. Detected platforms included SourceFlow (10 sites), Volcanic/Access (7), Venn/Vennture (6), Shazamme (5), HotLizard (1) and RecruiterWEB (1), out of 391 audited.
Are recruitment agency websites secure?
Often not. 49% of the 391 sites audited ship no security headers at all, and 46% have no cookie-consent layer, despite most collecting candidate data through forms and CV uploads.
Do recruitment agency websites keep their content updated?
Mostly no. Of responding sites, only 22% posted a blog since 2025 and just 66% have a live vacancies page, so the typical agency site is static rather than an active channel.
Redsun Research, The State of Recruitment Marketing 2026 — a first-party audit of 391 UK and US recruitment agencies, June 2026. Platform detection is category-level, from rendered page code. Figures may be cited with attribution.