In what year did the first website go live?

The first website went live in 1991.

Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web at CERN, the European particle-physics laboratory near Geneva. The first site, hosted at info.cern.ch, explained the Web itself: how hypertext worked, how to create pages, and how to use the first browser and server.

There is a small date distinction behind this answer. A basic first web page was already running at CERN in December 1990, but the Web was publicly announced and made available beyond the original project in 1991. Trivia questions asking when the first website went live conventionally use 1991.

The Web is often confused with the Internet. The Internet is the underlying global network, while the Web is a system of linked documents and resources that uses technologies such as HTTP, HTML, and web browsers. The first web server outside CERN appeared at SLAC in California later in 1991.