Freedom of information request
Number of websites archived into the UK Government Web Archive
- Freedom of information request reference
- CAS-326055
- Request resolved
Request
Please could you break down by year the number of websites which have been archived into the UK Government Web Archive? For example, in total, 564 websites were archived in 2024, 365 in 2023 etc. (These aren't real numbers just trying to give an idea of where I'm trying to get to).
Please could you provide data for each year from 2020 to 2026?
Outcome
Information provided.
Response
I can confirm that The National Archives holds information relevant to your request.
We are pleased to be able to provide this information to you.
| Year* | Number of websites archived† |
|---|---|
| 2020 | 2,450 |
| 2021 | 2,689 |
| 2022 | 2,851 |
| 2023 | 3,733 |
| 2024 | 3,693 |
| 2025 | 3,600 |
* defined as a calendar year, i.e. 00:00:00 on 1 January to 23:59:59 on 31 December.
† equivalent to unique hosts – see notes
Notes
In order to be as comprehensive and accurate in our response, we have decided to use the 'host' definition of a website. A host is the domain name of a server where a web service or files are hosted and are often differentiated by a subdomain. An example of a subdomain would be 'blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk', where 'nationalarchives.gov.uk' is the domain. The website content is stored on different servers between blog and the main webpage. In this example, both would be counted as separate websites. This is aligned to definitions used by the Internet Archive.
Included in the hosts list are cloud storage services and content delivery networks (CDNs). These are key parts of the Government web estate’s infrastructure, as they store and deliver file content, such as images, PDF files, and so on.
We extracted all the hosts from our web archive crawler configuration files. These illustrate that, on the date that each configuration file was generated, we intended to capture content on these hosts for inclusion in the UKGWA. To test that this intention resulted in an archive, we then filtered the list and included only those hosts that had one or more HTTP 200 'OK' response in that year.
URL shortening services occasionally appear in crawler configurations but have been excluded as these are redirect services and are not considered government websites.