How the Royal Family’s Internet Presence Has Evolved Over the Years
From its 1997 launch to today, royal.uk has served as both an informational hub and a curated archive—but what happens when history is quietly erased?
This article came about after a late-night dive into the Wayback Machine. If you don’t know what the Wayback Machine is, it’s an internet archive where you can view nearly all sites throughout their existence on the world wide web. While the website can be a bit finicky (as are most digitized archives — *shivers in history degree*) you can certainly find some good ol’ nostalgia. Beyond just the transformation of websites over the years, the Wayback Machine is also a great way to see top news stories of the day during a certain year.
Take the BBC for example. Here’s what their website looked like at the time this article was written.
And here is what it looked like on April 29, 2011, the day Prince William and Kate Middleton married. Obviously, the biggest story of the day.
Exploring the archive made me wonder, what did the royal family’s official website, royal.uk, look like throughout the years? How long has the royal family actually existed on the internet?
Today, the website’s appearance could be considered minimalistic, sporting just three colors throughout — white, grey, and blue. But the content within its pages is anything but minimal. It features biographies, history explainers, news, the court circular and more. It is the place to go for press releases, public announcements and royally curated articles and about pages. Essentially, a launchpad for the royal family’s marketing efforts. It also acts as a public archive, with press releases like this one from 1992, still viewable by the public. The website links off to other websites such as the Royal Foundation and the Royal Collection Trust, but for the purpose of simplicity, we will only focus on royal.uk.
Before we take a look at how the website changed over the years, we first need to take a look at its existence. Royal.uk was first launched in 1997 (older than Google!), but that wasn’t the first time the royal family had been linked to the internet. Queen Elizabeth II was actually the first royal to send an email, sending her first email using ARPANET during a visit to the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment in 1976. Talk about tech savvy!
Two decades later, royal.gov.uk launched. For the first time, a seemingly untouchable institute was now at the fingertips of millions of internet users around the world.
The website was officially launched by the Queen at a school in North London. During the launch, she sent an email to a school in central Ontario, quite literally connecting both countries via the internet. The photo below shows the launch and a snapshot of the website’s landing page. From the photo, we get a glimpse of what the 1997 site contained. The page contained links to information about royal residences, the royal collection (which now has its own website), the monarchy today, accession and succession and more. Another notable page on the early website is the visitor’s book. I was unable to find any information on this, but it was likely a section for visitors to write their name or comments. I can also imagine why it has since been removed.
I attempted via Google’s ability to narrow down search results using dates, to find news coverage of the website launch. While I was not able to find much, I happened across an article in The Spokesman-Review, a newspaper out of Spokane, Washington. The article, from March 7th, 1997, chronicles the official launch of the website, featuring, “150 pages of history, information and trivia for cyberloyalists to scroll through.”
The article details what the website would have looked like in 1997. There was even a section dedicated to each corgi? Bring that back! I was desperate to find a screen capture of the royal website from this time, but even the Wayback Machine failed to deliver. The article details how the website touched on Prince Charles and Diana’s divorce, with Charles’ page stating, “The marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales was dissolved in August 1996.” I attempted to find more information on how the first version of the site handled mention of Diana and Sarah Ferguson, but unfortunately, came up short.
While researching for this article, I stumbled upon archival footage of the launch. It doesn’t show any more of the website than the above photo and article, but does feature a quote still relevant to the monarchy today.
"The closer the Queen can come to the people and the needs of the people, the more chance there is of the House of Windsor remaining. After all a republic is knocking on the door and the only way to deflect that knocking is to carry out changes that are modern enough to attract people of all ages and of all backgrounds in the United Kingdom." says Harold Brookes-Baker, Burkes Peerage.
And he’s right.
The whole reason the royal family created a website was not only to inform the public during a time when public-support continued to waver, but to appeal to a new generation, the next wave of support.
A few years later in 2001, a new updated site launched. According to this press release, the new site was launched during a reception hosted by the Queen at Buckingham Palace for the broadcasting industry. The new site, with a clean and crisp design, featured a section on the Queen’s Golden Jubilee, a children’s coloring game, a recruitment section, financial information, and even an area to apply for a birthday or anniversary message from the Queen. The release mentions that the 2001 website would feature the latest tech advancements, Flash and DHTML, and with a new content management system that would allow the site to be updated hourly as needed. It seems the 2001 site, which came before archiving the internet, further expanded the original site’s abilities. It was still an official place of informative content, but featured a more hands-on approach to how the public interacted with the monarchy’s site. Applying for a message from the Queen? Kids games? It seems the updated 21st century site truly opened its doors to the public at a time when at-home internet usage was rapidly increasing.
Between the 1997 launch and 2001 update, another site emerged, royalinsight.gov.uk. The Guardian reported in 2002 that the site had been closed down, with visitors directed to royal.gov.uk. Royalinsight launched in 1999, just before the turn of the 21st century. It acted as a web magazine, a place to provide updates of the royal family's official engagements. The site received considerably fewer visits per month, 100,000, as opposed to royal.gov.uk, which saw one million visits per month. The closure was due to a need to streamline the monarchy’s internet presence, with a palace spokesperson stating, “We wanted a single site which would provide core information - such as details of the history of the monarchy - alongside essential information such as the Queen's jubilee plans…” It may also be important to note that the palace did not have full control over royalinsight.gov.uk, it was managed by the Press Association, which may have aided in the decision to close the site in 2002.
The Emergence of the Royal Family on Social Media
In 2007, as platforms like Facebook and Twitter started to rise, so did another site, YouTube. The popularity of the video hosting platform even made its way to Buckingham Palace, with this 2007 press release announcing the royal family’s YouTube channel, www.youtube.com/theroyalchannel. The channel, much like today, served as a hub for archived footage—such as the Queen’s 1957 Christmas Day broadcast—and videos of royal events. It was a strikingly modern step for a centuries-old institution, signaling its willingness to adapt to the digital age. By embracing YouTube in 2007, the royals ensured they would not be left out of the evolving online conversation, bridging tradition with the internet generation.
Two years later in 2009, the royal family officially joined Twitter (@RoyalFamily) and relaunched the royal website (again). The relaunch was held in the Blue Drawing Room at Buckingham Palace, with the inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee OM, KBE, traveling from the US to take part in the reception. In a full circle moment, Sir Tim Berners-Lee played a film of the Queen launching the site in 1997, before inviting the Queen to re-launch the site. The 2009 site saw further enhancements, a more accessible design, Google Maps integration with royal engagements, a media center, new search function, and more. The largest update to the site was the addition of a new media feature and rarely seen videos and documents from the Royal Archives. The official Youtube channel of the royal family captured the 2009 relaunch.
In between 2009 and the last large website revamp in 2016, the royal family continued to join the online world of social media. They joined Flickr in 2010, sharing modern and historical images. While their account is still up, they have not uploaded photos to the site since 2018.
In 2011, the royal family joined Facebook, which is still an active platform in which they upload daily. They joined Instagram in 2013, with Prince William and Kate, then the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, joining Instagram and Twitter a year later. Both platforms are active today, with weekly posts sharing news and photos of engagements. I wrote about their strategic use of Instagram Reels during the King’s coronation, here.
Out with the Old, and in with the New (Website)
The last relaunch of the website came in 2016, giving the entire website essentially a much-needed facelift. Upgrades included a mobile-friendly display in connecting with mobile phone users, who according to the press release, made up 60% of people under the age of 30.
The new site was renamed 'The home of the Royal Family', and incorporated social media and a visual-first approach as opposed to the text-based approach of the former website. The 2016 upgrade was designed by Reading Room, a digital agency. The site was easier to navigate and more visually appealing.
A Buckingham Palace spokesperson said: "The public expect to be able to engage with the role and work of The Queen and the Royal Family in ways they are familiar with.”
Essentially, meeting the public where they are. Online, engaging with interactive sites that tell them not only what something like the monarchy is, but what it does. When it comes to the depth of a site like royal.uk, it seemed the earlier site threw everything at visitors all at once, while the new site focused on a more minimal design while relaying the same content it had before in a digestible manner.
But how has the website held up since 2016? It has been updated several times, but not on the same level since. Some photos have been updated, as well as biographies. The site was slow to transition from using “The Queen” to “The King” following the passing of Queen Elizabeth II in September 2022. I wrote about the updates made in February 2024 to the site, and it seems that the site is now fully transitioned.
Overall, the site as it sits today contains a lot of information. Like, pages within pages of information. It almost feels…like it’s drowning in information? They embraced a minimal color palette but seemed to leave the written content itself alone, only adding to it as the years have passed. Which is considerably okay, as I view royal.gov as a public archive of the royal family’s work, but the site needs major help with its search engine and updating its landing page to the latest engagements. For example, the Princess of Wales visited a mother and baby unit at a prison in Chesire on February 11th, and despite plenty of news coverage, an official account of the engagement is nowhere on the landing page at the time of writing this article. It would be great if when visiting royal.uk, the most recent engagements would show up. The awkward block style that moves with the site features blocks of different sizes, which confuses me as a site visitor—are the larger blocks more important? I know it is nitpicky, but with concern over public perception, you would think the landing page of all places would be the most up to date section of the site.
In the Royal Family section, which is essentially a collection of biographies of almost each royal, the hierarchy of members of the royal family is ever so clear. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, since stepping back from their role as working royals, have made it to the bottom of the hierarchy, right next to the disgraced Prince Andrew. Harry and Meghan’s page gives a decent overview of their time as working royals and writes that, “As announced in January 2020, The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have stepped back as working members of The Royal Family.” One could call the biographies rather biased, not diving into the reasons why they both left. It does link each statement put out by Buckingham Palace on the matter, but that is it. While the page links to their new website, sussex.com, it does not mention The Archewell Foundation nor Prince Harry’s memoir, both post-royal initiatives.
A Lack of Transp
The site also faced scrutiny when it was revealed that a statement put out by Prince Harry in defense of Meghan against racist and sexist comments in 2016, had been removed. Newsweek reported the deletion, stating that the statement had been removed between Dec. 3, 2023 and Dec. 10. 2023.
Is removing Prince Harry’s statement a form of erasing the past? A form of censorship?
For a website that archives press releases from the 1990s and 2000s, as well as documenting royal engagements over the years, the removal of this statement raises concerns about historical integrity. Archival preservation relies on maintaining a complete and unaltered record of events, allowing future researchers and the public to access information as it was originally presented.
By selectively removing content, the site risks setting a precedent for revisionism, where certain narratives are altered or omitted based on changing circumstances. While organizations may update or refine their digital archives, erasing key statements undermines transparency and the fundamental purpose of historical documentation.
The Everchanging Digital Landscape
The internet has changed drastically since the 90s, and for the most part the royal family has been right there with its evolution. As an institute desperate to connect with the next generation, only time will tell before we see them joining TikTok.
As royal.uk has evolved since the 1997 launch, it mirrors the monarchy’s ongoing struggle to balance tradition with modernity, transparency with control. The site has served as both an informational hub and a carefully curated public archive. Yet, as seen with the removal of Prince Harry’s 2016 statement, digital history is not always set in stone.
The internet has given the public unprecedented access to royal narratives, but it has also made omissions and revisions more noticeable than ever. While the monarchy adapts to the ever changing digital age, the challenge remains: how does an institution built on legacy and continuity manage its own historical record in an era of instant access and permanent archives? The answer lies not just in what is preserved, but in what is quietly erased.
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