Companies Using Publii

Publii is the odd one out among static site generators: a desktop app with a visual editor, aimed at people who don't want a command line. I wanted to see who those people are. A domain counts in our crawl when its pages load the scripts Publii's themes write. On 15 October 2026 that was 1,304 live domains; after removing a casino network it was 1,013, and when I fetched every one of those homepages, 921 still showed the scripts. 493 match a company record. Publii is free under GPL-3.0, so the count is of sites.

A casino network in the raw count

290 of the 1,304 were casino and betting pages, about 22%: Pin Up and Pinco, 1win, Mostbet, Lucky Jet and a run of Chinese pages using the bet365 name. Most target Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkey, and many forward in groups to a shared casino domain. They're built from Publii templates, which is why they count. Only one of them matched a company record, an expired domain that once belonged to a real business.

Sales signal: about one raw Publii domain in five in our crawl was a casino page, so check any Publii list for them. Filter out .kz and casino keywords in the title before anyone sends an email.

The whole website, and a small business behind it

Only 7.0% of Publii domains were detected on a subdomain, against 58.0% for VitePress, and 45 of the 50 companies in our list run it on the main site. Those companies are small: 85.68% of the 412 with a known size have 1 to 10 employees and only 2 have more than 200. The list reads like a high street: a bookkeeping agency, a rowing club, an electrician, a Japanese language school, a Swiss logistics firm. PublishDrive, the self-publishing platform, and Loves Data, the analytics training company, are the best-known names.

The industries are spread thin. IT services (7.75%), software (5.75%) and business consulting (5.5%) lead, but hospitality (3.25%), retail (3.0%), photography (2.0%) and architecture (1.75%) follow close behind, and the ten industries in our chart add up to only 39.25% of matched companies. Publii's market is one kind of buyer rather than one trade: the small firm that wants a fast, cheap site it can edit itself.

Sales signal: the website owner and the buyer are the same person. Anything sold here has to work without a developer, and it has to work with static files: forms, comments, booking and search delivered as a script or a hosted service.

German-speaking, plus one hotel group

Germany has 104 matched companies, more than the United States (73). With Switzerland and Austria, German-speaking countries hold 116 of 435, and 132 of the 1,013 domains serve German-language pages. Italy has 24 and Norway 19, and Norway's number is mostly one customer: Unike Hoteller runs 18 hotel domains on Publii, from Skogstad Hotell to Wassilioff in Stavern.

"Publii's matched companies are more German than American, which is rare for a developer tool. It's a website tool for small European firms that happens to produce static files." - Mehmet Suleyman, CEO & Co-founder at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales signal: for privacy-focused analytics, consent or form tools, this is a German-speaking, small-business list. Lead with GDPR and hosting in the EU.

Where Publii sites live

Publii publishes over FTP, to Netlify, Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, GitHub Pages and GitLab Pages, and our data shows the mix. Percentages are of the 1,013 cleaned domains. Cloudflare sits in front of 33.76% and Netlify hosts 10.96%, GitHub Pages 6.52%. Traditional hosts carry the FTP crowd: GoDaddy 7.7%, IONOS 2.86% and the German host ALL-INKL 1.58%. Google Analytics is on 31.79%; Umami and Plausible are on under 3% each. Quicklink (12.14%), Masonry (8.29%) and Isotope (7.01%) come from Publii's own themes.

Sales signal: a third of these sites already sit behind Cloudflare and many publish to free hosting, so a hosting pitch is a hard one. The gap is analytics: about two thirds show no Google Analytics, and the privacy-first options are barely used.

No switching to speak of

Our switching tests found nothing to publish. Publii and Hugo share one domain today, out of five ever seen with both. 114 domains dropped Publii after tracking began in March 2026; 2 still run it on another hostname, and 5 of the rest were casino pages. For a tool used by small businesses, most of those exits are probably sites that closed or were rebuilt elsewhere, and 114 is too few to call a trend.

"Publii sites don't move in groups, in either direction. The tool serves a different person: the owner who wants a website without a developer." - Mehmet Suleyman, CEO & Co-founder at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales signal: don't build a campaign around switching. Build it around what a static site can't do on its own.

What I'd take away

• 1,013 real Publii domains, 0.08% of static site generators and 9th of 26, after removing 290 casino pages.
• It powers main websites, not docs or blogs: only 7.0% are on a subdomain.
• The matched base is tiny businesses, 85.68% with 1 to 10 staff, and Germany outnumbers the US.
• One hotel group, Unike Hoteller, accounts for 18 domains and most of Norway's count.
• No migration corridor in either direction.

How I'd prospect this list

On TechnologyChecker.io, filter for Publii and a company match, then split by country: the German-speaking group is the biggest single block. Open with the site itself: "Your website at yourcompany.de is a Publii static site; contact forms and bookings on static sites usually run through a separate service, and here's ours." Keep the offer self-serve, because the person reading it is the owner, not an IT team. For a competitive angle, the 1.78% of domains that also run WordPress are businesses with two systems, and one of them is probably a blog or shop they'd like to merge.

The full list of 1,013 Publii domains and 493 matched companies is on TechnologyChecker.io, with size, country and stack filters.