How to check the age of a domain or website
- Enter the domain, such as example.com, or paste the full website address. Subdomains and page paths are removed for you.
- Press Check age. The checker asks the domain’s official registry for its record, the same data a WHOIS domain age lookup shows.
- Read the result: the domain age in years, months and days, the domain registration date (the domain creation date), the expiry date with time left, the registrar and the name servers.
This domain age checker works as a domain age calculator: it counts from the registry’s creation date to today, so the figure is exact to the day, not rounded to the year.
Why check a domain’s age
- Spotting scams: a shop or bank site registered a few weeks ago deserves extra caution. Phishing sites are often registered only days before they are used.
- Buying a domain: check its domain history and expiry before paying.
- SEO and link building: see how long a site has been around before you buy a link, a guest post or the whole site.
- Your own domains: use it as a domain expiry date checker and see the expiry date before it lapses and someone else takes it.
Domain age vs website age
| Feature | Domain age | Website age |
|---|---|---|
| Counts from | The day the domain was registered | The day a site first went online |
| Source | Official registry (RDAP / WHOIS) | Archive snapshots, such as the Wayback Machine |
| Resets when | The domain expires and is registered again | Rarely; old snapshots stay |
| Best for | Ownership, scam checks, expiry | Content history, past owners’ sites |
For most purposes, website age and domain age are close, so this website age checker answers both “how old is a domain” and “how old is a website”. If you need to know what was on a domain before, open its earliest snapshot on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
How old are famous websites?
These are the registration dates of well-known domains, read from each one’s official registry record. Several are older than the company that uses them now: the name was registered by someone else first and bought later, or registered long before launch. That is the gap between domain age and website age in practice.
| Domain | Registered | Age | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| symbolics.com | 15 March 1985 | 41 years | The first .com ever registered |
| bbn.com | 24 April 1985 | 41 years | BBN built the ARPANET, the internet’s forerunner |
| ibm.com | 19 March 1986 | 40 years | — |
| apple.com | 19 February 1987 | 39 years | — |
| microsoft.com | 2 May 1991 | 35 years | — |
| x.com | 2 April 1993 | 33 years | Used for X (formerly Twitter) since 2023 |
| cnn.com | 22 September 1993 | 33 years | — |
| amazon.com | 1 November 1994 | 32 years | — |
| yahoo.com | 18 January 1995 | 31 years | — |
| ebay.com | 4 August 1995 | 31 years | — |
| tiktok.com | 21 July 1996 | 30 years | TikTok launched worldwide in 2017 |
| facebook.com | 29 March 1997 | 29 years | Facebook launched in 2004 |
| google.com | 15 September 1997 | 29 years | — |
| netflix.com | 11 November 1997 | 28 years | — |
| twitter.com | 21 January 2000 | 26 years | Twitter launched in 2006 |
| wikipedia.org | 13 January 2001 | 25 years | — |
| linkedin.com | 2 November 2002 | 24 years | — |
| instagram.com | 4 June 2004 | 22 years | Instagram launched in 2010 |
| youtube.com | 15 February 2005 | 21 years | — |
| reddit.com | 29 April 2005 | 21 years | — |
| openai.com | 19 January 2007 | 19 years | OpenAI was founded in 2015 |
| github.com | 9 October 2007 | 19 years | — |
| whatsapp.com | 4 September 2008 | 18 years | — |
Ages are counted to 4 November 2026, when the records were checked. Type any of these domains into the checker above for its age today, to the day.
Reading the domain status
- client transfer prohibited: transfer lock set by the registrar, normal and recommended.
- active / ok: no restrictions, the domain works normally.
- redemption period / pending delete: the domain has expired and will soon be released.
- server hold / client hold: the domain is suspended and will not resolve.
To see who is behind an IP address, use the IP WHOIS lookup; to see where the domain points, the DNS lookup; to check its certificates, the SSL certificate checker.