Long-lived sites worth studying: Daring Fireball, Berkshire Hathaway, Craigslist, Pinboard, GOV.UK, Stack Overflow, Wikipedia

Catalogue of sites that have run 10+ years without ground-up rebuild — the empirical foundation for the "build to last" argument.

• Daring Fireball (since 2002): Movable Type, self-hosted on Linode, static HTML output. Content separated from presentation; one author = one stack owner.
• Berkshire Hathaway (since 1997): Same HTML structure since 1997. Page weight ~198 KB; load time ~116 ms — orders of magnitude better than the modern average (median page is 2.56 MB per Web Almanac 2024: median desktop page weight — WordPress 2,252 KB, Wix 2,560, Squarespace 3,323; 90th pct crosses 8 MB). A brochure site that is just HTML can outlast a 30-year company without modification.
• Craigslist: Plain HTML, table-based layout; survived 25+ years of "modernization" trends; consistently profitable. Usability over fashion compounds.
• Hacker News (since 2007): Custom Lisp/Arc stack; intentional feature freeze; near-zero design churn. Scope discipline is an architectural choice.
• Wikipedia / MediaWiki: Open-source CMS, structured wikitext + templates, separated from skin/presentation. Structured content survives presentation changes.
• Stack Overflow (since 2008): Custom .NET; question/answer schema versioned for URL stability; permalinks preserved across redesigns. URL design is permanence design.
• GOV.UK (since 2012): Government Digital Service built on content store + APIs + reusable design system. Per GDS: "pages on GOV.UK built with the Design System download about twice as fast as those that haven't, as they use about half as much code." See GDS: GOV.UK Design System pages download 2x faster than non-system pages with half the code.
• Pinboard (since 2009): Plain PHP + MySQL + Perl scripts; explicitly chose "boring architecture is a feature"; serves tens of thousands of paying users on modest hardware. Tech choices constrained by "what one person can operate forever" drive longevity.
• Joel on Software (since 2000): Custom CMS, continuous publication, archive intact and linkable. URL stability + plain text + RSS = a 25-year asset.

Common pattern across all of them: Content separated from presentation. Minimal dependencies. URL stability as a design principle. Boring architecture as a feature. None of them rebuilt every 3 years.