Three in ten Baltic domains are dead. Is yours next?
Latvia has roughly 157,000 registered .lv domains and 49,258 living websites. Estonia and Lithuania look the same. The rest is dead, parked or forgotten.
“How many websites are there in Latvia” sounds like a question with a known answer, and the number people usually reach for is the registry’s count of .lv domains. That number is real, and it is roughly three times too large. As part of the Baltic Web Audit, our near-census of the Latvian, Estonian and Lithuanian web in July and August 2026, we followed every domain we could find down to whether a browser actually reaches a website behind it. Most do not.
In short
Latvia has roughly 157,000 registered .lv domains and 49,258 living websites. Estonia has about 200,000 .ee domains and 76,100 living sites, Lithuania 259,659 .lt domains and 95,014 living sites. Only about a third of registered Baltic domains, 31 to 38% depending on the country, is a website a person can open. Among the domains we could actually measure, three in ten are dead outright: 31% in Latvia, 29% in Lithuania, 25% in Estonia. A market-size claim that quotes a registry total is counting roughly two invisible domains for every visible website.
The funnel: registered, findable, living
Every country has two webs. One is the web of the registries: names that exist on paper, are renewed every year and get quoted in market-size decks. The other is the web a person can open. The numbers below run from the first to the second.
Registered. The Lithuanian registry publishes its count as a daily export, and on 12 September 2026 it read 260,583 registered .lt domains; when the audit pulled its data in late August it stood at 259,659. The Estonian registry reported 199,647 .ee domains at the end of June 2026 and announced passing 200,000 in early July. NIC.LV publishes a chart rather than a figure; read from that chart, .lv stood at roughly 157,000 in August 2026.
Findable. Our list of domains comes from Common Crawl’s domain graph, which records every domain that appears anywhere in its public index of the web. We combined four releases spanning a full year. Of roughly 157,000 registered .lv domains, 71,251 appear in that year of crawling. Of roughly 200,000 .ee domains, 101,728 appear. Of 259,659 .lt domains, 133,893 appear. A domain absent from a full year of the public web is a domain nobody linked to in a year, which is already its own kind of finding.
Living. We then visited every one of the 306,872 domains in that frame and measured 293,806 of them. A living website is one where a browser reaches a real page. That leaves 49,258 in Latvia, 76,100 in Estonia and 95,014 in Lithuania, about 220,000 living sites across the three countries.
| Registered | In a year of the public index | Living websites | Living share of registered | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Latvia (.lv) | roughly 157,000 | 71,251 | 49,258 | about 31% |
| Estonia (.ee) | roughly 200,000 | 101,728 | 76,100 | about 38% |
| Lithuania (.lt) | 259,659 | 133,893 | 95,014 | about 37% |
Estonia converts the largest share of its registrations into websites, Lithuania is close behind, and Latvia is lowest. One honest caveat, the same one the report’s own chapter makes: a living site missing from Common Crawl is possible in principle, so the living counts can only be undercounts, and only slightly.
What “dead” means
The three-in-ten figure is measured on the domains we could reach, not on the registry totals, and dead has a precise meaning in the study. A dead domain no longer points anywhere, or parks at a registrar’s placeholder page, or answers only errors when a browser knocks. It is not a slow site, not an ugly site, not a site behind a login. It is a domain someone once registered, and possibly still pays for, behind which no website exists any more.
In absolute terms that is 21,985 dead .lv domains, 25,628 dead .ee domains and 38,879 dead .lt domains. Measured against the registry totals rather than against our frame, the picture is starker still, because the domains that never appear in the public index at all sit on top of these.
The third state: alive only as a pointer
Between the living and the dead there is a third state. Of the sites where we could see where the browser ends up, 8.8% of Latvian, 10.8% of Estonian and 6.0% of Lithuanian homepages redirect to a different site entirely: 3,375, 6,896 and 4,485 domains. An old brand forwarding to a new one, a national domain forwarding to a .com, a project forwarding to its parent. The audit can even count the middle case: 1,471 Latvian, 1,717 Estonian and 1,072 Lithuanian national domains forward to the same brand on another top-level domain, a company holding its .lv or .ee purely as a signpost. Estonia, which has the fewest outright dead domains, has the most of these live forwarders; some of what looks like Estonian tidiness is consolidation.
These count as working. They are not counted as websites, because no website of their own exists behind them.
How a website dies
The audit cannot see intent, but it can see the stage before death. The report’s chapter on the frozen web counts the sites that still display a copyright year in their footer, 16,698 in Latvia, 22,790 in Estonia and 34,348 in Lithuania, and finds the year is 2020 or older on 14.6% of the Latvian ones, 8.6% of the Estonian and 14.3% of the Lithuanian. Those are living sites. In Latvia and Lithuania, one in seven of them has publicly dated its own abandonment.
That is where the next dead domains come from. A site nobody has touched in five years is one lapsed hosting bill, one expired certificate or one server upgrade away from answering only errors, and the fact that the domain renewal keeps going through does not save it. The renewal is a line on a card statement; the site is on nobody’s list at all. The domain outlives the website, and the registry keeps counting it.
What you can check yourself, and what needs a developer
Four checks need no developer and take a few minutes:
- Look your domain up. The checker at the top of the Baltic Web Audit tells you whether your address was among the 306,872 domains measured.
- Read your own footer. Open your site in a private browser window on a phone and find the copyright year. If it says 2020 or earlier, you are in that group, and a visitor reads that year before they read anything else.
- Find out who pays for what. Check whether the domain renewal and the hosting renewal go to the same person, and whether that person is still at the company. If the one paying is not the one responsible for the site, nobody will notice when it dies.
- Forward, never park. If a domain exists only to protect a name, point it at your real site. A forwarder counts as working; a parked page counts as dead, and to a customer it looks like a business that closed.
What genuinely needs a developer is keeping a site alive once it is more than a brochure: updates applied on time, certificates renewed before they expire, the server kept on a supported version, backups that have actually been restored once, and someone who notices when the homepage starts answering errors instead of a customer noticing first. None of that is glamorous and all of it is ordinary, well-understood work, which is exactly what our care plans cover.
Why we can say any of this
The figures here come from a near-census rather than a sample. We measured 293,806 of the 306,872 Baltic domains in our frame across July and August 2026, from one fixed location, with a crawler that identified itself honestly on every request. Everything is published as an aggregate and no individual site is ever named beside a weakness. The method and every chapter is in the Baltic Web Audit.
If you would rather know than guess, send us the address and we will tell you which side of the line your site is on today, and how far it is from the other side.