Almost nothing dates faster than a website. The magazine has been redesigned only twice in the past twenty years, but a website that is not transformed at least every four to five years soon seems as antediluvian as a cuneiform tablet. This speed of change means that it is surprisingly hard to reconstruct the digital past of an organisation, even one as conscious of its history as The Burlington Magazine.1 We launched our first website in the spring of 2000, which sounds quite late, but it was less than seven years after web browsers became widely available and less than two years after the introduction of web-development toolkits, which made website development a commercial reality for small organisations. In its initial form, our website did little more than provide information about the current issue of the magazine and where to buy it. In the following decade we were encouraged to be more ambitious by a major project: the creation of the magazine’s digital index. Instigated in 2005 with a substantial grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and completed in 2017 with a grant from the Monument Trust, this comprehensive searchable database of the magazine’s contents since its foundation in 1903 originally existed as a separate website. In 2014 this was integrated with the magazine’s main website, which was given other new functions, from offering access to free content from our archive to online purchasing of subscriptions, magazines and pdfs of articles.