Every day thousands of new domain names are being registered. Pick any dictionary word in English, and there exists a website for it with .com extension, or the domain is already registered. So what is the total number of websites in the world today?

Total number of websites in the world

As of 2019 September, there are over 1.7 billion websites registered! But that does not mean there are so many websites with information in them. The number of active websites is actually less than 200 million. So, there are only around 200 million websites that have a face. With a face I mean, you visit the website and it greets you with its home page with links to other pages in that website.

What are these 1.5 billion websites then? Well they are just domain names. Domain names are different from websites. Most of the domains are registered, but no websites have been created and hosted for them. That is the reason that we have a billion plus domain names, but only few million active websites. After all, it is easy to create a website name than fill it with content.

So most of these domain names are just parked domains. And most likely very few of them can ever expected to have websites hosted.

Growth of the World Wide Web

  • info.cern.ch was the first website in the internet that went live on August 6, 1991
  • The WWW was invented at CERN by British physicist Tim Berners-Lee and was made available by CERN on a royalty free basis to the public domain! In other words, CERN released the entire WWW technology into public domain.
  • Yahoo was launched in 1994.
  • Amazon was launched in 1995.
  • Google was launched in 1998.
  • Paypal was launched in 1999.
  • Wikipedia was launched in 2001.
  • There were 23500 websites in 1995.
  • By 2000, there were 17 million domains registered.
  • This became more than 200 million domains by 2010.
  • By 2016, a whopping one billion domains had been registered.
  • Check the latest number of websites

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