Check the Age of a Website

So someone asked me the other day how old a website was that he had seen the other day and I immediately asked what he meant by “age”. If you want to know the age of a website, you could be talking about how long the domain name has been around.

On the other hand, you could have a domain that’s been around for a decade, but has hosted different websites owned by different people over the years.

In this article, I’ll show you to check the age of the domain and also check to see if the site has changed over the years. One blog I used to follow over a decade ago is now the corporate site for a startup because the original owner sold off the domain.

Check Domain Name Age

You can check out some free tools that give you the approximate age of a domain. Domain Age Tool will just give you the domain name and the age of the domain.

Another tool called Domain Age Checker will tell you when the domain name was created and give you the age of the domain. I found this second tool to be more accurate, at least for my own sites.

Lastly, if you really want to see detailed info, you can always do a WHOIS lookup using a site like Network Solutions and unless the domain is registered privately, you can see when it was created:

So that’s how you can see the age of a website regardless of who owned the site and what content it had. If you want to see how the site changed over time or just see how long the latest owner has owned the website, then you can use a different tool.

Check Age of Current Website

To do this, you have to use something like Internet Archive WaybackMachine. It’s a little bit of a tedious process, but it’s really the only way to see how long a particular version of a website existed for. Go to their website and enter the URL you want to check:

Click on the Browse History button and you’ll get a nice little timeline starting from 1996 that shows the crawls performed by their servers. On the calendar below, you can see which days have snapshots by looking at the blue circles.

Click on a particular day and you can see what the website used to look like before:

As you can see, that’s what OTT used to look like! What a difference! The snapshots are kind of random and there can be long periods where there are no snapshots, so you might not be able to drill down to the exact date that a website was changed, but it’s the closest you’ll get to figuring something like that out.

So those are the two ways to check the age of a website and hopefully you find the information you need. Enjoy!