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First question
Can you actually recover a deleted website?
In most cases — yes. A deleted website is rarely as gone as it feels. The web has been systematically archived since 1996 by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, which has captured over one trillion snapshots of websites at various points in time. If your site existed at any point during the last two decades and was publicly accessible, there's a reasonable chance that one or more copies exist in the archive right now.
The Wayback Machine is not the only place your site may still exist. Search engines like Google and Bing cache pages for weeks or months after they go offline. Alternative web archives including Archive.today, Arquivo.pt and the Common Crawl project independently archive portions of the web.
What you typically can't recover is dynamic data that was never publicly visible — database contents, user accounts, form submissions, and backend logic. What you can recover is the public-facing website: every page, article, image, CSS file, and piece of design that a visitor could see. For most website owners, that's exactly what matters.
Common causes
Why websites disappear — and what it means for recovery
The cause of your site's deletion matters for recovery, because different causes leave different traces behind.
Expired hosting or domain
Very recoverableThe most common cause. When a hosting subscription lapses, web hosts typically keep files for 30–60 days before deleting them. If your domain also expired, the site disappears from the live web entirely. Recovery via archive is almost always possible here.
Accidental deletion
Usually recoverableYou or someone with server access deleted the files or database. If this happened recently (within 7–30 days depending on your host), your hosting provider may still have a backup. If more time has passed, archive recovery is the best path.
Hack or malware
Often recoverableHosting providers often suspend and delete sites that contain malware. The good news: the Wayback Machine crawled your site before the hack, so earlier clean versions are available.
Failed migration
Usually recoverableData loss during a server migration or CMS transfer is devastatingly common. If the live site went down during the migration, the most recent Wayback Machine snapshot is your fallback.
Platform shutdown or account termination
Partially recoverableYour website builder, CMS host, or SaaS platform closed down, or your account was terminated. Recovery depends on whether the Wayback Machine crawled your subdomains or custom domain.
Deliberate deletion with no backup
Recoverable from archiveYou deleted the site yourself at some point and now want it back. Full recovery via archive is possible as long as the site existed long enough to be crawled.
Recovery options
How to recover a deleted website — all methods compared
There are several approaches to recovering a deleted website. Understanding each one helps you pick the right path for your situation.
1. Check your hosting provider's backup first
Before trying anything else, contact your hosting provider's support team. Most major hosts — SiteGround, Cloudways, Kinsta, WP Engine, Hostinger, GoDaddy — retain automatic backups for anywhere from 7 to 60 days after deletion.
Time-sensitive
Hosting provider backups expire quickly — typically within 7–60 days. If your site was recently deleted, this should be your first call.
2. Recover from the Wayback Machine
If your hosting provider can't help — or if too much time has passed — the Wayback Machine is your primary recovery option. Go to web.archive.org, enter your domain, and look through the calendar of available snapshots.
The challenge with manual Wayback Machine recovery is that you can only view and copy individual pages through the browser interface. Manual downloading leaves you with raw archive files — broken internal links, Wayback Machine toolbars on every page, old tracking scripts, and no sitemap.
Our tool automates all of this. Paste your Wayback Machine URL and receive a clean, ready-to-host ZIP in 1–4 minutes — with all links fixed, toolbars removed, trackers stripped and a sitemap generated.
3. Google and Bing cache
Search engines cache pages for a period after they go offline — typically days to a few weeks. Google removed its cached page feature in early 2024, replacing it with a link to the Wayback Machine. Bing still offers cached pages through the Bing cache system.
4. Alternative web archives
Several other archives may have copies of your site that the Wayback Machine missed. Archive.today captures user-submitted snapshots. Arquivo.pt focuses on Portuguese and global sites. The Common Crawl project releases massive public crawls of the web.
How we help
How RestoreMyWebsite recovers deleted websites
We've built a purpose-built pipeline for recovering deleted websites from web archives. It's not a manual process — every step is automated so you get a clean, working website back in minutes rather than hours.
When you enter your domain, we query the Wayback Machine CDX API to find every available snapshot across all dates. Our AI scorer evaluates each snapshot for completeness — comparing page counts, asset availability, and content quality — and recommends the version most likely to give you the best recovery.
Realistic expectations
What you can and can't recover from a deleted website
Being honest about what's recoverable helps you make an informed decision. Archive-based recovery is powerful but not magic.
What can be recovered
- All publicly visible HTML pages
- Blog posts, articles, landing pages
- Images, photos and media files
- CSS stylesheets and site design
- JavaScript and interactive elements
- Site structure and navigation
- Meta titles, descriptions and SEO data
- Internal links and page relationships
- Fonts and design assets
What cannot be recovered
- Database contents (users, orders, comments)
- Password-protected or login-gated pages
- Form submissions and contact history
- E-commerce transaction records
- WordPress plugins and their settings
- Server-side code and PHP logic
- Files that were never publicly crawled
- Very new pages added just before deletion
The practical result: For most website owners, archive recovery delivers 80–95% of their public-facing site. All the content that Google indexed, all the pages visitors could see, and all the design that made the site work — recovered and cleaned up into a single ZIP file you can host immediately.
The process
How to recover your deleted website — step by step
Check your hosting provider
Before using archive recovery, contact your hosting provider immediately. Most hosts keep automatic backups for 7–60 days after deletion.
Enter your domain above
If hosting backups aren't available, enter your domain in the form at the top of this page. We'll scan the Wayback Machine and other web archives for free.
Review available snapshots
You'll see a list of archive dates showing how many pages are available in each snapshot. Our AI recommends the most complete version.
Pay once and download
Once you've chosen your snapshot, pay a single flat fee based on your site's size — from $19. No subscription. Secure payment via Stripe.
Upload to any web host
Extract the ZIP and upload the contents to your web host. The README walks you through hosting setup step by step.
WordPress
Recovering a deleted WordPress website
WordPress is the most common platform we recover deleted websites from. The process is slightly different from a static HTML site because WordPress stores content in a database and runs PHP — neither of which is archived by the Wayback Machine.
What we recover is the rendered HTML output of your WordPress site — every page exactly as it appeared to visitors, with all posts, pages, images, and design intact. The result is a clean static HTML version of your old WordPress site.
If you need the recovered content back in a live WordPress installation, that's a separate step. You can manually copy page content from the recovered HTML files into a new WordPress installation, or contact us to discuss a full WordPress migration service.
Quick tip for WordPress recovery
Before using archive recovery, check whether your WordPress hosting provider has an automatic backup. Managed WordPress hosts — WP Engine, Kinsta, Pressable, Cloudways — almost always have automatic backups retained for 14–60 days.
SEO
Recovering your SEO after a deleted website
When a website goes offline, Google eventually deindexes its pages. How quickly this happens depends on how long the site is down — Google typically gives pages several weeks before deindexing, but a site that's been down for months or years will have been fully removed from the index.
The good news: restoring a deleted website with its original URL structure is one of the fastest ways to recover search rankings. Google recognises the returning pages and often re-crawls and re-indexes them quickly, particularly if the domain still has backlinks pointing at it.
Our recovery includes a complete sitemap.xml generated from all recovered pages. Submit this to Google Search Console immediately after your site goes back online to accelerate re-indexing. For expired domains, this is especially important.
Submit sitemap
Submit the included sitemap.xml to Google Search Console on day one. Included in every recovery.
Keep original URLs
Our recovery preserves your original URL structure so Google recognises the returning pages.
External links nofollow
Old outbound links get rel="nofollow" automatically to protect your recovered domain's equity.