How to recover a website from the Wayback Machine

The Wayback Machine, run by the Internet Archive, saves public pages as its crawler visits them. The number of captures varies by site. A well-known brand can have hundreds of captures across years, and a small business site can have a handful. What the captures hold:

• Page copy from every page the crawler reached
• Layout, structure and navigation
• Product and service descriptions
• Logos and images, at the resolution the crawler saved
• Blog posts, case studies and press pages that were public
• Page titles, metadata and the old URLs

Anything that lived behind the page or behind a login. The archive saves what a visitor could see, so plan to rebuild these.

• Forms and form submissions. The form's look survives; the part that sent the entry somewhere does not.
• Databases, logins and member areas. Pages behind a login were never crawled.
• Store checkout, orders and plugins. Archived pages don't restore the WordPress database, plugins, orders or private form submissions.
• Private files and original source files, including fonts and full-size images stored only in the old site's admin.
• Video, audio and interactive features.
• Anything published after the last capture.

1. Confirm your rights. You need the legal right to reproduce the website and its assets. Ownership, a signed engagement from the owner or an assignment of rights covers it.
2. Find the captures. Search your domain at web.archive.org and pull every capture of every page. Add cached pages, screenshots and any files you still hold.
3. Map the pages. List every page and old URL, and mark what's complete, what's partial and what's missing.
4. Rebuild on WordPress. Rebuild the sitemap, navigation and page templates on hosting your business controls, matching the original where the record supports it. A person reviews every page before it ships.
5. Restore domain and DNS access. Confirm who controls the domain, the DNS and the hosting, then point your own domain at the rebuilt site.
6. Set the redirects. Keep the old URL structure where you can, redirect any path that changed, and rebuild the sitemap, robots file and page metadata so search engines can crawl the site again. Pages other sites link to should load.
7. Rebuild what ran behind the page. Contact forms, memberships, donations and checkout get built new and tested before anyone relies on them.

Our website recovery page covers how we run each step.

• Domain registrar access. Find out which company holds your domain and whose name and email are on the account.
• DNS access. DNS sometimes sits at the registrar and sometimes at a separate company. Whoever holds it controls where the domain points.
• Your email setup. If your email runs on the same domain, list the current mail records before anything changes, so mail keeps arriving when the domain moves.
• Photos and files you own. Brand files, original photos, old proposal decks, invoices with copy attached, email drafts, screenshots and any handoff from a previous designer. Private records often fill the exact pages the archive missed.
• Proof of your rights to the site and its content.

The scope and the quality of the archive set the timeline. The coalition signed on July 14, 2026, and its recovered site was live on July 15. The full rebuild shipped on August 17, the date we committed to in writing, and the annual meeting page with ticket and sponsorship checkout went live on August 27. In September we added company, phone and billing details to the membership and donation forms and multi-ticket orders, and the coalition now takes dues, donations and event tickets on its own site through the card processor it already used. Larger sites, online stores and sites with a lot of dynamic content take longer. The full case study covers each step.

• The owner holds the accounts. Keep the domain, DNS and hosting in the business's name, on an email address the business controls, with renewal dates on a calendar.
• Keep backups you can reach. Schedule backups of the site files and database, and keep a copy somewhere other than the hosting account.
• Keep your own copy of your content. Store original photos, logos and page copy in a folder your business owns.
• Put the site on a care plan. Our care plan clients get an every-other-Friday email, put together automatically, that says what we did to keep their site running.