Find Companies Using LiteSpeed: API Detection Guide (2026)

LiteSpeed is a drop-in replacement for Apache that reads the same configuration files and speaks the same module conventions, which means nobody ends up on it by drifting. Somebody chose it—either the site owner who migrated for performance, or a host that standardized its whole fleet on it. Both of those are useful things to know about a prospect, and both are readable from a single HTTP response.

This guide covers how LiteSpeed detection actually works at the header level, why the LiteSpeed Cache plugin is often a stronger signal than the web server itself, why a CDN in front changes the picture without erasing it, and how to run a whole prospect list through the DetectZeStack API to produce a LiteSpeed-confirmed lead list.

Why Companies Using LiteSpeed Are a High-Signal Prospect List

Technographic data—what a company runs—qualifies prospects in ways firmographic data cannot. A confirmed LiteSpeed detection tells you several things at once:

• Somebody made a performance decision. The default answer in most stacks is Apache or Nginx. Running LiteSpeed means either the site owner migrated deliberately or their host did. Either way there is a performance-conscious party in the picture, which is exactly the audience for caching, CDN, monitoring, and Core Web Vitals tooling.
• It skews heavily toward WordPress. LiteSpeed's commercial pitch is built around WordPress acceleration, and its cache plugin is one of the most installed performance plugins on the platform. A LiteSpeed detection alongside WordPress is a very specific prospect profile: a site owner who already spends attention on page speed.
• It maps to a hosting segment. A large share of LiteSpeed deployments come from shared and managed hosts that standardized on it fleet-wide. If you sell to hosting companies, or sell tooling that competes with what those hosts bundle, the detection identifies both the host's customers and, indirectly, the host.
• Version-free, but CPE-tagged. LiteSpeed does not publish its version in the Server header by default, so you should not expect a version string. The detection still carries a CPE identifier (cpe:2.3:a:litespeedtech:litespeed_web_server), which is enough to route the domain into a vulnerability workflow keyed on product rather than version. Our CPE guide for security teams covers that pipeline.

The workflow below is the same one we documented for finding companies using Nginx—only the filter changes.

How LiteSpeed Shows Up on a Live Website

LiteSpeed detection is header analysis. There are three families of signal, and they fail in different situations, which is why using more than one matters.

The Server Response Header (LiteSpeed and OpenLiteSpeed)

The primary fingerprint is the Server header, and it is unusually clean—LiteSpeed writes its own name and nothing else. Here is a real response from LiteSpeed's own site:

$ curl -sI https://www.litespeedtech.com | grep -iE "^(server|x-lsadc)"
x-lsadc-cache: hit
server: LiteSpeed

Two things are worth calling out. First, there is no version. Unlike Nginx or Apache, which frequently append a version to the Server value, a stock LiteSpeed install publishes the bare product name, so the version field on a LiteSpeed detection is normally empty. Do not build a segmentation that depends on it.

Second, the fingerprint is an exact match on the value LiteSpeed, not a substring search. That matters because it means a host that customizes the banner—Server: LiteSpeed/6.0 Enterprise, or a white-labeled string—will not match on this signal alone. The cache headers below are what rescue those cases.

Why OpenLiteSpeed and LiteSpeed Enterprise Look Identical From Outside

This is the single most common misconception about LiteSpeed detection, so it is worth being blunt: you cannot tell the two editions apart from the response headers. OpenLiteSpeed, the open-source edition, sends the same value as the commercial one. Here is openlitespeed.org itself:

$ curl -sI https://openlitespeed.org | grep -iE "^(server|x-litespeed)"
server: LiteSpeed
x-litespeed-cache: hit

Because of that, DetectZeStack reports one technology named LiteSpeed for both editions. There is no separate OpenLiteSpeed entry, and any tool claiming to split them from headers alone is inferring, not detecting. If the edition genuinely matters to your segmentation, treat the detection as "LiteSpeed family" and narrow it with context you can actually observe—shared-hosting IP ranges, control panel fingerprints, or the rest of the stack in the same scan.

LiteSpeed Cache Fingerprints (x-litespeed-cache, x-turbo-charged-by)

The LiteSpeed Cache plugin for WordPress is a separate detection, and for prospecting it is frequently the more valuable one. The web server tells you what the host chose; the plugin tells you what the site owner chose. Someone installed, activated, and configured it.

It announces itself three ways: the x-litespeed-cache response header carrying hit or miss, an x-turbo-charged-by: LiteSpeed header, and its asset path /wp-content/plugins/litespeed-cache/ in the rendered HTML. DetectZeStack matches on all three, and because the plugin declares an implies relationship, a LiteSpeed Cache detection also adds LiteSpeed to the results even when the Server header never showed it.

Why Reverse Proxies and CDNs Can Mask the Signal

Every external scanner sees the outermost hop. Put Cloudflare in front of a LiteSpeed origin and the Server header becomes cloudflare—the origin's value is gone. If Server were your only signal, the site would look like a miss.

The vendor-specific headers are what save this, because most edges pass unknown response headers through untouched. Here is a real example—a WordPress host behind Cloudflare:

$ curl -sI https://chemicloud.com | grep -iE "^(server|x-turbo|x-litespeed)"
server: cloudflare
x-turbo-charged-by: LiteSpeed

The Server header says Cloudflare and is telling the truth about the edge. The x-turbo-charged-by header leaked straight through from the origin and is telling the truth about what is behind it. A detection pass that reads both reports LiteSpeed and Cloudflare for this domain, which is more informative than either alone.

The honest caveat: a strict edge that strips unknown headers masks the origin completely, so a negative result behind a CDN is an unknown, not a confirmed miss. Keep those domains in a separate column rather than your rejects file. For the full picture of what the edge layer reveals, see our guide to detecting the CDN and hosting provider of any website.

Manual Detection Methods and Where They Break Down

curl -I, Browser DevTools, and Extensions

curl -sI is the fastest one-domain check and needs nothing installed. Browser DevTools gets you the same headers under the Network tab, plus the rendered HTML for the plugin asset path. Browser extensions wrap the same inspection in a click.

All three share the same ceiling: they answer for one domain, in one tab, right now. Nothing about them produces a filterable dataset.

Why Manual Checks Do Not Scale Past a Few Domains

Say you have a list of 2,000 prospects and want the LiteSpeed subset. Manually that is 2,000 tab-opens, 2,000 header reads, and a spreadsheet you maintain by hand—before you account for redirects, timeouts, domains that only respond on www, and the CDN-masking case that requires you to check three headers rather than one. The failure mode is not that it is slow. It is that a manual pass silently drops the masked-origin domains, and those are disproportionately the larger companies you most wanted to find.

Detect LiteSpeed With the DetectZeStack API

The DetectZeStack API runs the full detection pass—HTTP headers and body fingerprints, DNS records, and TLS certificates—in a single call and returns structured JSON you can filter in a script. LiteSpeed comes back as a named technology in the Web servers category; LiteSpeed Cache comes back under Caching and WordPress plugins.

Trying It Without a Key Using /demo

You can test right now against the public demo endpoint, no API key required (it is IP-rate-limited, so use it for spot checks, not bulk scans). This is a real response:

$ curl -s "https://detectzestack.com/demo?url=litespeedtech.com" \
  | jq '.technologies[] | select(.name == "LiteSpeed")'
{
  "name": "LiteSpeed",
  "categories": ["Web servers"],
  "confidence": 100,
  "description": "LiteSpeed is a high-scalability web server.",
  "website": "https://litespeedtech.com",
  "icon": "LiteSpeed.svg",
  "cpe": "cpe:2.3:a:litespeedtech:litespeed_web_server:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*",
  "source": "http"
}

The source: "http" field tells you this was a header-layer match, which is why confidence is 100. No version is present, exactly as expected for LiteSpeed. The CPE identifier is ready for vulnerability tooling.

Single-Domain Check With /analyze and /check

The authenticated /analyze endpoint returns the same shape as /demo with the full response envelope. Here is a real scan of a host that sits behind Cloudflare—the categories map is the fastest way to read a result:

$ curl -s "https://detectzestack.p.rapidapi.com/analyze?url=kualo.com" \
  -H "X-RapidAPI-Key: YOUR_KEY" \
  -H "X-RapidAPI-Host: detectzestack.p.rapidapi.com" \
  | jq '{domain, categories, meta, cached, response_ms}'
{
  "domain": "www.kualo.com",
  "categories": {
    "Analytics": ["Google Analytics", "Cloudflare Browser Insights"],
    "CDN": ["Cloudflare", "BootstrapCDN"],
    "Caching": ["Litespeed Cache", "LiteSpeed Cache"],
    "Cloud hosting": ["Google Cloud"],
    "Cookie compliance": ["CookieYes"],
    "JavaScript libraries": ["jQuery"],
    "UI frameworks": ["Bootstrap"],
    "Web servers": ["LiteSpeed"],
    "WordPress plugins": ["Litespeed Cache", "LiteSpeed Cache"]
  },
  "meta": {
    "status_code": 200,
    "tech_count": 13,
    "scan_depth": "full"
  },
  "cached": false,
  "response_ms": 1401
}

Note what happened: Cloudflare is in the CDN category because that is what the Server header said, and LiteSpeed is still in Web servers because the cache headers leaked through the edge. Both duplicate cache entries appear, which is the naming gotcha from earlier showing up in practice.

When all you need is a yes/no answer for one technology on one domain, /check is the cheapest call:

$ curl -s "https://detectzestack.p.rapidapi.com/check?url=docs.litespeedtech.com&tech=litespeed" \
  -H "X-RapidAPI-Key: YOUR_KEY" \
  -H "X-RapidAPI-Host: detectzestack.p.rapidapi.com"
{
  "domain": "docs.litespeedtech.com",
  "technology": "LiteSpeed",
  "detected": true,
  "confidence": 100,
  "version": "",
  "categories": ["Web servers"],
  "response_ms": 814,
  "cached": false
}

The tech parameter is case-insensitive and the response echoes back the canonical name. Note the empty version—that is normal for LiteSpeed and not a failed detection.

Scanning a List of Domains With POST /analyze/batch

For list building, POST /analyze/batch accepts up to 10 URLs per request and analyzes them concurrently. Each entry in the response carries either a full analysis result—the same shape as a single /analyze response—or an error string for domains that could not be fetched.

Here is a complete, copy-pasteable pipeline using nothing but bash, curl, and jq. It reads domains.txt (one domain per line), sends batches of 10, and appends every LiteSpeed-confirmed domain to litespeed_leads.csv with whether the cache plugin was found and the total technology count:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# find-litespeed.sh — filter a domain list down to LiteSpeed-confirmed leads
KEY="YOUR_KEY"
HOST="detectzestack.p.rapidapi.com"

echo "domain,has_cache_plugin,tech_count" > litespeed_leads.csv

# Process domains.txt in batches of 10 (the /analyze/batch maximum)
xargs -n 10 < domains.txt | while read -r batch; do
  urls=$(printf '%s\n' $batch | jq -R . | jq -s '{urls: .}')
  curl -s -X POST "https://$HOST/analyze/batch" \
    -H "X-RapidAPI-Key: $KEY" \
    -H "X-RapidAPI-Host: $HOST" \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -d "$urls" |
  jq -r '.results[]
    | select(.result != null)
    | .result
    | [.technologies[].name | ascii_downcase] as $names
    | select($names | index("litespeed"))
    | [ .domain,
        (($names | map(select(. == "litespeed cache")) | length) > 0),
        (.meta.tech_count | tostring) ]
    | @csv' >> litespeed_leads.csv
done

wc -l litespeed_leads.csv

A 1,000-domain list becomes 100 batch calls. Domains that fail to resolve or time out appear in results[] with an error field instead of a result, and the select(.result != null) guard skips them cleanly. The ascii_downcase step is what handles the LiteSpeed Cache / Litespeed Cache duplicate noted earlier. For throughput planning, retry queues, and a production-ready Python version of this scanner, see how to batch scan 1,000 websites.

Two fields matter most when reading the results:

• confidence — LiteSpeed hits are header matches, so expect 100. Lower-confidence entries elsewhere in the scan come from the DNS and TLS layers.
• meta.scan_depth — "full" means the HTTP fetch succeeded and header detection ran. "partial" means only DNS and TLS layers completed, so an absent LiteSpeed entry tells you nothing—put that domain in a retry queue, not your rejects file.

Comparing Two Sites Side by Side With POST /compare

When you want a diff rather than a list, POST /compare takes 2 to 10 URLs and returns, for each domain, its technologies plus a unique array of what only it runs, alongside a top-level shared array:

$ curl -s -X POST "https://detectzestack.p.rapidapi.com/compare" \
  -H "X-RapidAPI-Key: YOUR_KEY" \
  -H "X-RapidAPI-Host: detectzestack.p.rapidapi.com" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"urls": ["openlitespeed.org", "chemicloud.com"]}' \
  | jq '{shared, per_domain: [.domains[] | {domain, unique}], total_ms}'

This is the fastest way to answer "does this prospect run the same stack as the customer we just closed," which is the core of competitor technology analysis.

Building a Companies-Using-LiteSpeed List End to End

Seed, Enrich, Then Filter

The pipeline is three steps and the order matters. Seed a domain list from wherever your prospects already live—CRM export, industry directory, conference attendee list. Enrich every domain through /analyze/batch and store the full technology array, not just a LiteSpeed boolean. Filter afterward, in your own data.

Storing the whole stack is the part people skip and regret. The scan costs the same either way, and next quarter when you want the WooCommerce subset or the Elementor subset of the same list, you re-filter locally instead of re-scanning. Our lead enrichment pipeline guide covers the storage and scoring layer.

Segmenting the LiteSpeed Population

Once enriched, the combination of detections separates meaningfully different prospects:

The third row is the one worth dwelling on. A WordPress site on LiteSpeed with no LiteSpeed Cache is a site whose host handed it a performance feature it never turned on. That is a concrete, verifiable observation you can open a conversation with, and it is invisible to firmographic data.

What to Do With the List

The list is only worth what the segmentation lets you say. A few patterns that work:

• Hosting and migration vendors — The LiteSpeed population is concentrated on shared and managed hosts. Cross-reference against your own customer stack to find prospects already primed for the performance argument you sell.
• WordPress agencies and plugin vendors — The LiteSpeed plus WordPress plus Elementor combination is a well-defined buyer profile, and it comes out of the same scan. See finding companies using WordPress for the CMS-layer version of this pipeline.
• Performance and monitoring tools — Anyone running LiteSpeed has already agreed that page speed matters. You are past the education stage on the first call.
• Security teams — The CPE identifier routes every detection into vulnerability tooling keyed on product, which is the useful granularity when the version is not published.

The caching-layer comparison is worth making explicit: LiteSpeed Cache is a plugin-level cache tied to a specific web server, whereas WP Rocket is server-agnostic and paid, and Varnish is a separate self-hosted caching tier entirely. Which one a company runs says something different about its budget and its engineering depth.

How DetectZeStack Compares to Other Tech Lookup Tools

Most technology lookup tools will tell you a site runs LiteSpeed. The differences that matter for list building are elsewhere: whether you get structured JSON you can pipe into jq rather than a rendered page, whether batch endpoints exist so 1,000 domains is 100 calls instead of 1,000, whether the detection reads vendor headers that survive a CDN rather than the Server header alone, and whether the free tier is enough to validate the pipeline before you commit. DetectZeStack is built around those four. Our comparison of tech stack detection APIs lays out the field in detail.

Get Your API Key and Start Detecting

The free tier includes 100 requests per month with no credit card—enough to validate the pipeline on a sample of your prospect list before scaling up. Sign-up is instant through RapidAPI:

1. Get a key at rapidapi.com/mlugoapx/api/detectzestack.
2. Spot-check a domain you know: curl -s "https://detectzestack.p.rapidapi.com/check?url=yourdomain.com&tech=litespeed" -H "X-RapidAPI-Key: YOUR_KEY" -H "X-RapidAPI-Host: detectzestack.p.rapidapi.com"
3. Run the batch script above against your first 100 domains.

Conclusion

Finding companies using LiteSpeed comes down to reading more than one header. Server: LiteSpeed is the clean case; x-litespeed-cache and x-turbo-charged-by are what keep the CDN-fronted origins in your dataset instead of silently in your rejects file. Accept up front that the version will be empty and that OpenLiteSpeed and the Enterprise edition are indistinguishable from outside—then build the segmentation on what you can actually observe, which is the rest of the stack sitting next to the detection.

The same pipeline generalizes to any technology in the detection database: swap the jq filter and you are segmenting by CMS, CDN, or payment stack instead of web server.