Domain age

Domain age checker: what the report shows

Enter a domain or any URL from the site. The checker first queries RDAP, the JSON-based successor to WHOIS, and if the registry does not support it, falls back to the zone's WHOIS server. You get four fields:

• Registration date, from which the domain age is calculated in days and years.
• Expiry date with the number of days left. A red badge means under 30 days, yellow under 90. If it is your domain and the badge is red, renew today: once it lapses, the website and email on that domain stop working.
• Updated: the last change to the record, such as new nameservers, new contacts or a renewal. A recent date on an old domain is not a warning sign.
• Registrar: the company the domain is currently registered through.

Subdomains are not registered separately, so blog.example.com is checked as example.com. The checker takes the last two labels of the name. For second-level country zones such as .co.uk or .com.au, query the registry's WHOIS directly as shown below.

Domain age is not website age

"How old is this website?" and "when was this domain registered?" sound like the same question, but the answers often differ:

• The domain may have dropped and been re-registered. If the owner let it expire and someone else registered it, the creation date resets. A site on a "2025 domain" can be a new project on an address that once hosted something completely different.
• The domain may have been bought without a gap. The registration date stays old even though the site is new. Transfers between registrars do not change the creation date either.
• The domain may have sat parked for years, so the real site went live long after registration.

How to find out how long a website has existed

1. Wayback Machine. Open web.archive.org/web/*/example.com: the calendar shows the first capture and what the domain hosted over the years. From a terminal, curl "http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=example.com&limit=1" returns the earliest record.
2. Certificate Transparency logs. Searching the domain on crt.sh shows when its first TLS certificate was issued, a good proxy for when the site went live on HTTPS.
3. Clues on the site itself: the first blog post, the oldest reviews, the copyright range in the footer, lastmod dates in the sitemap.
4. External mentions: the oldest links to the site, social profiles, company registry entries.

If WHOIS says ten years but the first archive capture is from six months ago, or ten years ago the domain hosted a different business, the address is on a new life and its old age counts for little.

Checking registration dates by hand: WHOIS and RDAP

Country-code registries publish WHOIS in their own formats, and not all of them support RDAP. If the report shows no date, check manually. macOS and Linux ship a whois command:

whois example.com      # Creation Date / Registry Expiry Date
whois example.co.uk    # Registered on / Expiry date
whois example.pl       # created / renewal date

For .com, .net, .org and other generic zones, querying RDAP directly is the cleanest option:

curl -s https://rdap.org/domain/example.com | jq '.events'

Look for the registration and expiration events. Even when the owner uses WHOIS privacy or the data is redacted under GDPR, the dates remain public. Only the name, address and email are hidden. For the full record, including nameservers and domain status codes, use the WHOIS lookup.

Domain expiry: what happens after the date passes

RDAP returns dates in ISO 8601 UTC, for example 2027-01-13T00:12:14Z, and the checker counts the days left from now. A domain is not usually released on its expiry date. For generic zones (.com, .net, .org) the cycle looks like this:

1. Expired, renewable at the normal price. Registrars typically allow a grace period of up to 30–45 days. The site may already be down, because many registrars swap in a parking page.
2. Redemption period, about 30 days. You can still recover the domain, but only through the registrar and for a restoration fee well above the renewal price.
3. Pending delete, 5 days, during which the domain cannot be restored. It then drops and anyone can register it, often a drop-catching service within seconds.

Country-code zones have their own rules. Nominet, for instance, suspends an expired .uk domain before cancelling it. Ask your registrar for the exact timeline. Either way, the advice is the same: turn on auto-renew and keep the email on your registrar account current, because that is where the reminders go.

Does domain age affect SEO?

Short answer: the registration date itself does not move rankings. Google's John Mueller has said plainly that domain age helps nothing. Registering a domain for many years ahead is not a confirmed ranking signal either. Renew long-term so you do not lose the address by accident, not for rankings.

Older sites often do rank better, but because of what they have accumulated rather than the date: years of links, indexed content, brand mentions and user history. A new site lacks exactly those signals, so the first months are slow. People call this the "sandbox", although Google does not officially acknowledge one; see the Google sandbox explainer. If you need a faster start, build what actually counts: content that matches queries and links from indexed pages.

When checking domain age is genuinely useful

• Buying an aged or expired domain. Compare the registration date with the archive: was there a gap, and what lived there before — a casino, a pharmacy, a doorway? That history can bring manual actions and spammy backlinks with it. More in the article on expired domains.
• Vetting an online shop before you pay. A store claiming "20 years in business" on a domain registered three weeks ago is a serious red flag. The website trust check helps you gather the other signals.
• Screening link prospects. Age is a secondary filter: a brand-new domain with thousands of links looks suspicious, and an old domain with no traffic is worth little.
• Keeping your own portfolio alive. Once a quarter, check expiry dates for every company domain, including defensive registrations and old brands.