How many websites go offline every day?

What link rot and disappearing websites mean for you personally

You have almost certainly clicked a link that returned a 404. That is link rot, and it is far more systematic than most people realize. For academic research, the damage is documented: studies on citation link decay find that 50 to 60% of URLs cited in academic papers stop working within 10 years.

For everyday users, the impact is slower and more diffuse. The recipe bookmarked three years ago. The news article you meant to cite. The forum thread with the answer to a problem you have not had yet. All of it carries a meaningful chance of being gone before you look again. Government and institutional archives are particularly exposed: when administrations change, entire sections of official websites can vanish without warning or archiving.

The closest thing to a counter-measure is the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, which has preserved over one trillion web pages since 1996. It is the only public record of much of what has vanished. The web you see today will not look like the web in five years.

The scale of web impermanence: 105 million domain deaths per year

Websites going offline vs. new websites created, today

Net web growth is positive: more domains are registered each month than expire. But the churn is constant, and most of what disappears leaves nothing behind.

From the first 404 to one trillion archived pages: a history of web decay

1. 1996Wayback Machine / Internet Archive founded; begins archiving the web
2. 2000Dot-com bust: tens of thousands of startup websites disappear as companies fail
3. 2005Wikipedia study: 49% of citations become inaccessible within 10 years ("link rot")
4. 2021Harvard study: 25% of deep links in New York Times articles (1996-2019) broken
5. 2024DNIB: ~364M global domains; ~260K expire daily; Wayback Machine: 866B pages archived
6. 2025DNIB Q4 2025: ~386.9M global domains, +22.7M year over year; ~276K expire daily even as the overall base keeps growing
7. 2025Wayback Machine passes one trillion archived web pages, up from 866 billion a year earlier
8. 2026DNIB Q1 2026: ~392.5M global domains, +24.1M year over year; ~281K expire daily as churn keeps pace with growth
9. 2026DNIB Q2 2026: ~401.6M global domains, +29.9M year over year (+8.1%); ~287K expire daily, with the yearly growth rate up from +6.5% in Q1

Domain expiration trends over time

Studies by the Pew Research Center found that 38% of web pages from 2013 were unreachable a decade later, more than four times the 8% rate for pages posted in 2023 itself. Domain expiration, hosting lapses, and platform shutdowns kill tens of millions of pages per year, making "link rot" a significant threat to the long-term accessibility of the web's collective knowledge.

Link rot and digital death: the web's quiet disappearing act

In perspective

Frequently asked questions

How many websites expire or go offline each day?

Verisign's DNIB data shows about 26% of domains expire without renewal each year. With 401.6 million global registrations as of Q2 2026, that works out to around 105 million expirations per year, or about 287,200 a day. That count includes parked and never-active domains. Studies estimate 35 to 40% of expiring domains had live content, but no published source measures that split directly.

What happens to a website's content when the domain expires?

When a domain expires, the website becomes unreachable. After a grace period of 30 to 75 days, the domain enters redemption and eventually goes back into the pool for re-registration. The content is not automatically saved anywhere. The Wayback Machine archives billions of pages, but coverage is uneven: small sites are often never crawled, and most are only partially preserved.

Is the web growing or shrinking?

Growing overall, but churning heavily. Netcraft data shows 8 to 17 million new sites per month, while about 8.5 million domains expire monthly, so the net is positive. But tens of millions of sites die each year. Most were started by small businesses, individuals, or startups that ran out of reasons to keep paying renewal fees. Very few leave any trace.