According to the latest numbers, there are more than 162 million websites on the internet today. We have come a long way since the first baby steps of the World Wide Web. Back in January of 1996 we had 100,000 websites, and if we go back to mid-1993 there were only a total of 130 websites. Not much need for Google in those days…

So how has the number of websites grown over time? Here is how we got from 1 to 162 million websites:

Number of websites, Dec 90 to Jan 96

Date	Number of websites
Dec 90	1
Dec 91	10
Dec 92	50
Jun 93	130
Sep 93	204
Oct 93	228
Dec 93	623
Jun 94	2,738
Dec 94	10,022
Jun 95	23,500
Jan 96	100,000

The world’s first website

Wonder about that one, single website back in December of 1990? That was info.cern.ch, the first-ever website and web server, created by Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the WWW).

It’s amazing how the web has gone from consisting of just this first little web page to the huge network of millions and millions of websites that it is today, and how pervasive the web has become in our society. We do our banking online, read our news online, have our encyclopedias online, meet friends online. And all this has happened since 1990.