How Many Websites Are There?

30 years ago, on 6 August 1991, British physicist Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in Switzerland published the first ever website, the WorldWideWeb (W3). Fittingly, the site was about the World Wide Web project, describing the Web and how to use it. Hosted at CERN on Berners-Lee’s NeXT computer, the site’s URL was http://info.cern.ch.

By the end of 1992 there were ten websites online and, after CERN made the W3 technology publicly available on a royalty-free basis in 1993, the internet gradually started to grow into the all-encompassing giant that it is today. A "Website" is defined a unique hostname, i.e. a name which can be resolved, using a name server, into an IP Address.

By 1994, there were close to 3,000 sites, one of which was a fledgling Yahoo! which, originally called 'Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web', started its online life as a web directory. By the time Google came onto the scene there were over two million websites. As our infographic shows, there are 1.88 billion websites today and looking at Internet Live Stats' counter, this figure is currently increasing at a fast rate.