Webrings were a popular method to connect websites with similar topics in the 1990s and early 2000s, before big social media sites or search engines existed. It started around 1994 and were most common between 1996 and 2002, during a time when the internet was full of personal websites and small online communities.
A Webring is a group of websites linked together by a navigation bar. This bar made visitors able to move from one site to the next. They usually have buttons like Previous Page, Next Page, Random Page, or Ring Home. There were / are Webrings about all sorts of topics: Fan-pages, hobbies, politics, music, tech, and more.
In the mid-2000s, Webrings started to disappear. New tools like blogs, CMSs, and social media platforms became more and more popular. Big Webrings like Yahoo! WebRing or RingSurf shut down or stopped updating. By around 2005, most Webrings were no longer active.
Webrings today
Even though Webrings mostly died, there are still communities using them. Since the late 2010s, small groups have started using Webrings again, to bring back a fun, nostalgic and creative way to share websites. Platforms like Neocities are using Webrings as a way to escape the boring, standardized and closed-down look and feel of modern social media.
This site is also part of a few interesting webrings! Here you can start traversing:
← Retronaut Webring →
