Web hosting & CMS
Twelve schools and a network, and no two build their website quite the same way. They fall into four camps: managed WordPress, modern JAMstack, bespoke/enterprise, and off-the-shelf builders.
Four camps
WordPress is the single most common platform — six of the thirteen sites run it, and every one was on the same current release (WordPress 7.0.2) when observed, which suggests they are actively maintained rather than left to rot. But they don't share a host or even a page-builder: Cambridge builds with Elementor Pro (plus a LaTeX plugin for rendering maths), Leeds with Beaver Builder on SiteGround, Lancaster on 34SP.com, and Durham runs a WordPress Multisite built by Discovery Design.
The most telling overlap is Exeter and U-Maths. Both run WordPress on Kinsta — a premium managed host — behind Cloudflare, because the same body (the Exeter & North Devon Colleges Group) owns both domains. In infrastructure terms the national network's website is an Exeter Maths School website.
The two newest well-resourced projects went modern-static. Aston runs a client-rendered single-page app (its content served from an S3-backed "crstl" CMS) and 1729 runs a Remix + Sanity site — both deployed on Netlify. 1729's Sanity backend is shared with Mill Hill's own website, a tell that it's built and run as part of the Mill Hill estate.
Three schools run bespoke or enterprise platforms tied to their parent institution. King's sits inside King's College London's own web estate on the Contensis enterprise CMS; Imperial is a bespoke ASP.NET/IIS application on Woodhouse College's infrastructure that borrows Imperial College branding; Liverpool runs a Greenhouse School Websites build (a Windows/IIS product) at Krystal.
The remaining two use off-the-shelf products. Surrey is on Cleverbox, a specialist school-website platform (the giveaway is its "High Visibility Version" accessibility toggle), hosted on AWS in Dublin. Nottingham — still pre-opening — is a bare GoDaddy Website Builder placeholder.
The full picture
| School | Platform / CMS | Web host / origin | CDN |
|---|---|---|---|
| Exeter | WordPress | Kinsta | Cloudflare |
| KCL | Contensis | Zengenti (Contensis) | — |
| Liverpool | Greenhouse School Websites | Krystal | — |
| Lancaster (LUSoM) | WordPress | 34SP.com | — |
| Cambridge | WordPress | Netservers | — |
| Imperial | Microsoft IIS + ASP.NET | Compuweb Communications | — |
| Leeds (LMaS) | WordPress + Beaver Builder | SiteGround | Cloudflare |
| Surrey | Cleverbox | Amazon Web Services (eu-west-1, Dublin) | — |
| Aston | Client-rendered SPA (crstl CMS) | Netlify | Netlify Edge |
| Durham | WordPress (Multisite) | UKFast / ANS Group | — |
| Nottingham | GoDaddy Website Builder | GoDaddy (on AWS) | — |
| 1729 | Remix (React) + Sanity CMS | Netlify | Netlify Edge |
| U-Maths | WordPress | Kinsta | Cloudflare |
Three sites — Exeter, Leeds and U-Maths — sit behind Cloudflare, which hides the true origin. We recovered the origins anyway from tell-tale headers: Kinsta for Exeter and U-Maths, SiteGround for Leeds (its sg-cachepress optimiser leaks through). Aston and 1729 use Netlify's own edge. Everyone else answers directly from their host.