The First Website Ever Made

Believe it or not, the very first website ever created is still online and it’s super simple. It was launched in 1991 by a scientist named Tim Berners-Lee at a research lab in Switzerland called CERN.

You can actually visit it right now: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

The site wasn’t for shopping, games, or cat videos. It was made to explain how the World Wide Web works—a kind of instruction manual for how to create and view websites. At the time, most people didn’t even know what the Internet was!

So when did other websites appear?

Not long after that first site launched, more websites started popping up (slowly at first). By the end of 1992, there were only about 26 websites in the entire world! But once the idea caught on, things exploded. By 1994, there were thousands. Today? There are over a billion websites online.

A few more cool facts:

• The first photo ever shared on the web was of a comedy band made up of CERN employees, called Les Horribles Cernettes.

• The early web had no images, just plain text and links. It was like reading a digital instruction book.

• Tim Berners-Lee didn’t charge anyone for using the idea of the Web. He gave it to the world for free, so anyone could build websites.

Conversation Starter: If you could make the first-ever website today, what would you put on it?”