If you type info.cern.ch into your browser today, you will have gone to the address of the world's first website. Black text, white background, blue underlined links. No images, no animation. But this plain page is the starting point of a network that now reaches over a billion sites.
There is just one small footnote: the page you see is not exactly the 1991 original. We'll get to that shortly.
A proposal at CERN, a NeXT computer
In March 1989 Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal for a distributed information system at CERN and resubmitted a slightly revised version in May 1990. According to CERN's Web@30 page, by Christmas 1990 he had defined the web's basic concepts (HTML, HTTP and URL) and written the first browser/editor and the first server software.
The server ran on a NeXT computer at CERN, and its address was info.cern.ch. The first website was hosted on this machine and described the World Wide Web project itself: what the web is, how to use it, where to get the software.
August 6, 1991: the web opens to the world
The Centre for Computing History writes that the first website was published on August 6, 1991. On the same day Berners-Lee announced the WWW software in the alt.hypertext newsgroup. According to CERN, this announcement was the moment interest in the web began from outside the physics community.
So the date is a bit layered: the site was running inside CERN at the end of 1990, and in August 1991 it was announced to the outside and became accessible to everyone. Sources may highlight either of these two dates for the "first website".
So what does "still live" mean?
Here is that footnote. The first site's files from 1991 weren't preserved as they were. On April 30, 2013, the 20th anniversary of the web being made public, CERN started a project to bring the first site back at its original address. According to CBC News, the restored version is a copy dated 1992 found in CERN's archives. According to CBC, the project aimed not only to restore the page but also to restore the original machine names and IP addresses, recreate the first text-based browser experience and document the original hardware. CERN's web manager Dan Noyes said it "may be the oldest copy they could find" and that they would keep looking for older ones.
So what you see at info.cern.ch today is the oldest version of the first website that we have. The address is the same, but the content is a snapshot from 1992. Saying "still live" is right, but saying "the same page has been up for 35 years without ever going down" is not quite right.
There is another important date: on April 30, 1993, CERN released the World Wide Web software into the public domain. This was one of the biggest reasons the web spread so quickly as an open standard.
From 1 site to 1.5 billion
Netcraft's July 2026 web server survey reports receiving responses from 1,494,915,628 sites. This number is a count of "sites", not domain names; the survey counts about 305 million unique domain names in the same period. Most of these sites aren't active. In the same survey Netcraft writes that Cloudflare, with 50,838,387 active sites, makes up 23.46 percent of active sites; calculated from that, the number of active sites is about 217 million, only about 14.5 percent of the total.
| Then | Now |
|---|---|
| Late 1990: 1 site, 1 server | July 2026: about 1.49 billion sites (Netcraft) |
| Black text, blue links | Video, apps, AI |
| A "DO NOT POWER IT DOWN" label on the server | Data centers spread across the world |
| 1993: the software went into the public domain | The web still runs on open standards |
Thinking about this picture, the value of the first site is easier to see. It has no ads, no cookie notice, no video or subscription pop-up; just text and links. But the idea of clicking a link and moving to another document still sits at the foundation of every page you open today.
A project that began on a single computer grew into today's giant network through CERN's decision to open the software to everyone.
If you visited info.cern.ch yourself, what would surprise you most on that first page?