What Is the Oldest Website Still Online?

The first website went live on 6 August 1991, at info.cern.ch. Tim Berners-Lee built it at CERN on a NeXT computer, and it explained what the World Wide Web was, because at that point nobody knew.

You can visit it today. But the honest answer is more interesting than that, because “still online” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

What you are actually looking at

The page at that address is a restoration. CERN brought it back in 2013 as part of a project to preserve the web’s origins, and the version they published is a 1992 copy recovered from the project’s own archives — not the 1991 original, which was not kept.

That is not a criticism. Nobody archives the first of something, because nobody knows it is the first while it is happening. It does mean the precise claim is “the first website, restored from the earliest surviving copy” rather than “the 1991 page, untouched”.

Three different questions

Most arguments about this are people answering different questions:

• The first website ever made? info.cern.ch, August 1991. Settled.
• The oldest page still at its original address? Harder. Several university and research pages have sat at the same URL since the early nineties.
• The oldest site never significantly changed? Hardest of all, and the most interesting — this is where the genuinely strange survivors live.

The never-updated survivors

These are the ones worth your time. Sites that were finished, forgotten, and never taken down — Space Jam’s 1996 promotional site is the famous example, preserved at its original address in its original design.

The nostalgia vault collects the ones still running. This guide covers where to find the rest.

Why so little survived

Hosting is rented, domains expire, formats stop being readable, and almost nothing was anyone’s job to preserve. An entire era of Flash content became unplayable almost overnight.

What exists now exists because volunteers saved it deliberately — covered in how the internet loses things forever.

The thing worth taking from this

The web is thirty-odd years old and we have a restoration of its first page rather than the page itself. Whatever you are looking at now is far more fragile than it feels.

If a page matters to you, save it. It takes seconds and the alternative is trusting a link.

Keep going

Internet Artifacts walks through the web’s history object by object, and the vintage web collection shows what the early years actually looked like.