In this article, I will show you how to check the age of a domain and also check if a site has changed over the years. One blog I followed over a decade ago has now become a corporate startup site because the original owner sold the domain.
Check the age of the domain name
You can use some free tools to find out the approximate age of a domain. The Domain Age Tool will simply give you the domain name and domain age.
Another tool called Domain Age Check will tell you when a domain name was created and tell you the age of the domain. I find the second tool to be more accurate, at least for my sites.
Finally, if you really want to see the details, you can always do a WHOIS search using a site like Network Solutions, and if the domain is not privately registered, you can see when it was created:
In this way, the age of a website can be determined regardless of who owns the website and what content it contains. If you want to see how the site has changed over time, or just to see how long the last owner owned the site, you can use a different tool.
Check the current site age
You need to use something like Internet Archive WaybackMachine for this. It’s a bit of a tedious process, but it’s actually the only way to know how long a particular version of a website has existed. Go to their website and enter the URL you want to check:
Click the Browse History button and you get a nice little timeline from 1996 that shows the scans done by their servers. In the calendar below, you can see which days there are snapshots by looking at the blue circles.
Click on a specific day and you will see how the website used to look like:
As you can see, this is exactly what OTT looked like! What’s the difference! Snapshots are random and there can be long periods of no snapshots, so you won’t be able to detail the exact date the website was modified, but that’s the closest thing to calculating something like this from.
So these are two ways to check the age of a website and hopefully you find the information you want. Enjoy!
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