If you are here, you must be searching for “how to tell when a website was last updated?” Sometimes you might want to know the last updated date of a website for any reason. Most probably you want to know whether the content published on this website is still valid or not. If the website owner did not mentioned the last modified date or published date for that web page, then it will be difficult for readers to decide if they should follow such information or not. It is always a good practice for website owners to display last modified date on their web pages.
How to tell when a website was last updated?
It has several methods to do but not all of these works every time. Last updated date of a website or a web page is normally not accessible by the website visitors and it is only available to the website owners who have access to hosting control panels. If you are looking to know how to tell when a website was last updated, we will share some ways to make it possible.
Follow these methods to see when was a website last updated.
1. JavaScript Command URL
This is widely used method to know the last modified date of a web page. Open the URL for which you want to know the last updated date, copy and paste the below command into the browser’s address bar and press enter.
javascript:alert(document.lastModified)
Note: Be careful, that when you paste this command in address bar, the javascript will disappear and only alert(document.lastmodified) will be pasted, you will have to type javascript: it manually. After pressing enter, it will display a pop up showing the last updated date for that web page.
2. Using Google Search
Google search also displays the published or updated date of the web page if it is indexed by Google. You have to type below in the Google search:
inurl:yoursite.com/page-url/
Change yoursite.com/page-url/ to the URL of the page you are checking. You will see the result showing the date of the publication of the web page.
3. Checking Last Modified Code in Page Source
This method also works most of the times to get the last updated date of a web page. Open the web page for which you want to know the last updated date. Now right click anywhere on the web page and select the “View Page Source”. This will open a source page of this web page. Now by using the Find function of the browser, search for modified or publish keywords. You will most probably find a date of last update or publishing as shown in the below screenshot.
4. Using Archive.org – Way Back Machine
This method can also be tried to find when a web page was published. Way Back Machine’s web crawler is always crawling web pages on the internet and it saves the screenshot of the websites. But the problem is that we can not specify the date and we cannot even get the exact publish date for a web page. It may have few or many screenshots for a web page. You can give it a try to check when a website was last updated.
We hope that these methods will help you in your question “how to tell when a website was last updated”.