The Telegraph celebrates pioneering online news for 30 years 

This week the Telegraph celebrates the 30th anniversary of its website. In 1994, ‘The Electronic Telegraph’ was the first national newspaper in Britain to launch online, pioneering web publishing and news techniques which had never been tried before.

The Electronic Telegraph launched at noon on 15 November 1994. The task was to upload the print version of the paper to the web, meaning that articles appeared online at 12.01am each day. 

At the time, the process was crude and cumbersome with articles being downloaded from the print newspaper editing system onto tape and then uploaded as files onto a server. 

Since then, the website has continued to innovate and evolve, like the worldwide web itself, building up into a round-the-clock and constantly updated product. The logs could be checked, as a list of files, with metrics on which had been the most popular. 

So far in 2024, the website has reached more than 200m readers and had 1 billion page views. To mark the anniversary, the Telegraph will be free to access for 24 hours.

The website has been recognised as UK News Website of the Year at the Press Awards for the last two years running and now delivers breaking news, onsite tools, interactive quizzes and evergreen content to readers and subscribers across news, health, money, sport, travel and lifestyle. 

Chris Evans, Editor of The Telegraph said: “We were first to offer online news in the UK and, 30 years later, we are still first for news, features and comment. Congratulations to all those who have worked so hard to make the Telegraph website such a success.”