My old website had hundreds of blog posts — will they all come back?

High-volume blogs are excellent candidates. The more a site published, the more frequently the Wayback Machine crawled it. Our free scan shows exactly how many pages are available.

Can I choose which version of my old website to restore?

Yes. If multiple snapshots exist, you can choose any specific version. Our AI scanner recommends the most complete snapshot, but the choice is always yours.

Will the restored old website look exactly like the original?

In most cases, yes. The Wayback Machine captured your pages as they rendered in a browser. Minor differences can occur when assets weren't captured, but these are the exception for well-crawled sites.

I don't have the domain anymore — can I still restore the old website content?

Yes. You can restore content from any domain regardless of ownership. The archive retrieval is based on the domain name, not domain ownership.

What format does the restored old website come in?

You receive a ZIP file containing clean static HTML — all pages, CSS, JavaScript, images, plus sitemap.xml, broken link report and README with hosting instructions.

Can I restore an old website and convert it back to WordPress?

The restoration gives you clean static HTML. You can host as-is or use the recovered files as content source while rebuilding in WordPress.

Restore Old Website – Bring Any Old Site Back Online

Q: How far back can you restore a website from?

The Wayback Machine archives go back to 1996. We've restored websites that have been offline for over 15 years. The quality depends on how often the site was crawled.

What this is

What does it mean to restore an old website?

Restoring an old website means taking a site that no longer exists on the live web — because its hosting expired, files were deleted, a domain lapsed, or the platform it was built on shut down — and bringing it back as a working, hostable website using archived copies.

Since 1996, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has been crawling and saving snapshots of websites across the entire web. Right now it holds over one trillion archived pages. Your old website — whether it went offline last year or a decade ago — is almost certainly in there, waiting to be retrieved.

Our service automates the retrieval and cleanup process. We download every available page from the archive, fix all the broken links, strip the Wayback Machine toolbars that get injected into every archived page, remove old tracking scripts, generate a fresh sitemap, and package everything into a single clean ZIP that you can upload to any hosting provider. The result is your old website, back online — exactly as it was.

Common reasons

Why people restore old websites

The reasons to restore an old website are more varied than most people think. Here are the most common situations we help with every day.

Forgot to renew hosting or domain

The most common reason by far. An expired credit card, a missed renewal email, or a cancelled account — and suddenly years of content is gone. Restoring from the archive gives you everything back regardless of how long it's been offline.

Lost access to the original files

The developer who built the site disappeared. The old server was decommissioned. The hard drive failed. Archive restoration bypasses all of this — we recover directly from publicly archived snapshots.

Bought an expired domain, want the old content

Domain investors and SEO professionals regularly purchase expired domains with strong backlink profiles. Restoring the original content preserves topical relevance and the SEO value that made the domain worth buying.

Platform or website builder shut down

Website builders, SaaS hosting platforms and old CMS services shut down — sometimes with very little warning. Archive restoration recovers your content regardless of what happened to the original platform.

Rebuilding a PBN from expired domains

PBN builders use archive restoration to quickly rebuild the original content on expired domains. Our service is purpose-built for this use case — fast, clean output, large site support, sitemap included.

Business wants its old brand history online

Companies sometimes want to restore old versions of their website for historical reference, legal purposes, or brand continuity. Archive restoration gives you any version of the site from any point in its history.

Site was hacked and content was destroyed

Hackers sometimes wipe or deface website content. Restoring from a pre-hack archive snapshot gives you back the legitimate site exactly as it existed before the attack — with no malicious code.

Content lost in a server migration

Failed migrations are surprisingly common. Files overwritten, databases corrupted, the wrong version deployed. Archive restoration recovers the pre-migration version of the site independently of what happened to the server.

Time doesn't matter

How old can your website be and still be restorable?

This is the question most people get wrong. There is no practical age limit on archive restoration. The Wayback Machine has been continuously archiving the web since 1996 and preserves its archives indefinitely. We have restored websites that have been offline for over 15 years.

What determines whether your old website is restorable isn't how old it is — it's whether it was publicly accessible when it was online, and how frequently the Wayback Machine's crawlers visited it.

Site went offlineArchive availabilityTypical recovery

Within last 30 daysExcellent90–98%

1–12 months agoVery good85–95%

1–5 years agoGood75–90%

5–10 years agoModerate60–85%

10–20 years agoVariable40–80%

Before 2000Limited20–60%

Recovery percentages are indicative. Our free scan shows you exactly what's available for your specific domain before you pay anything.

How it works

How to restore your old website — step by step

Four steps from domain entry to a live, working website. No technical knowledge required.

Enter your old domain and scan for free

Type your old domain name into the form at the top of this page. We query the Wayback Machine CDX API and return every available snapshot — the dates, estimated page counts, and a recommendation for the most complete version. This takes about 30 seconds and costs nothing.

Choose which version to restore

Browse the available archive dates and pick the version you want — the most recent, a specific year, or a version from before a particular event. Our AI scorer highlights the snapshot with the best page coverage and asset availability.

Pay once and we process your restoration

A single flat payment based on your site's size — from $19 for small sites. No subscription, no recurring fees. Your old website goes through our full restoration pipeline: every page downloaded, all links rewritten, toolbars stripped, trackers removed, sitemap generated.

Download your clean ZIP and go live

Your restored website is delivered as a clean ZIP in 1–4 minutes. Upload the contents to any web host — shared hosting, VPS, static hosting — and your old website is live again. A README with hosting instructions is included.

What you get back

Everything that gets restored — and what doesn't

Archive restoration retrieves everything that was publicly visible on your old site. It cannot retrieve data that was never accessible to public visitors.

Restored from archive

Every published page and post
Complete site design, layout and CSS
All images, photos and media
Navigation structure and menus
Meta titles and SEO descriptions
JavaScript and interactive elements
Product pages and descriptions
Category and tag pages
Fonts, icons and design assets
Auto-generated sitemap.xml

Not in the archive

Database content (users, orders)
Password-protected pages
WordPress plugin settings
Unpublished drafts
Form submission history
E-commerce transaction records
Server-side code and config
Files never linked publicly

What's included

What's included in every old website restoration

Raw archive files are unusable as a live website. Our restoration pipeline cleans everything automatically — there are no add-ons or extra fees.

Wayback toolbar removal — The archive injects its own header into every page. Every file is cleaned — the result looks exactly like your original site.

Internal link rewriting — All archive.org URLs rewritten to clean relative paths. Navigation works correctly on your own server.

Tracker & analytics removal — Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, Hotjar and 15+ other tracking scripts removed from every page automatically.

Image and asset recovery — All images, CSS, fonts and JavaScript downloaded locally and linked correctly. No dependency on archive.org.

Auto sitemap.xml — Fresh sitemap generated from all restored pages — ready to submit to Google Search Console on day one.

External links nofollow — All outbound links tagged rel="nofollow" automatically to protect your domain's SEO equity.

UTF-8 encoding fix — Old charset encoding converted to modern UTF-8 so all characters display correctly in every browser.

Broken link report — Every page and asset that couldn't be found in the archive is listed so you know exactly what's there and what's missing.

README and hosting guide — Step-by-step instructions for uploading and going live on any hosting provider — included in every ZIP.

Who uses this

Restoring old websites — by use case

Restoring an old website to get content back

You built a site years ago, it went offline when hosting expired, and you want the content back. Archive restoration gives you everything in one ZIP — no manual copying from the Wayback Machine. Upload to a host and the old site is live again in minutes.

Restoring an expired domain for SEO

You bought an expired domain because it has strong backlinks in your niche. Restoring the original content puts topically relevant content back on the domain — signalling to Google that the domain is back in business in the same niche.

Restoring an old site to preserve history

Some old websites have historical value — early documentation, archived journalism, old community forums. Restoration preserves the site properly, with all its original design and structure intact.

Restoring an old client website

Agencies and freelancers regularly encounter clients who lost access to their old website. Archive restoration turns a client recovery project into a 4-minute job instead of days of manual reconstruction.

Restoring a website to relaunch a brand or business

Sometimes a business closes, a domain lapses, and then someone buys it back later. Restoring the original site gives you an instant starting point: all the original content, design and SEO structure.

After restoration

Getting your old website back in Google after restoration

When an old website has been offline for a long time, Google will have deindexed its pages. Restoring it doesn't automatically bring back rankings — but it gives you the best possible starting point for re-establishing search visibility quickly.

The most important step is submitting the included sitemap.xml to Google Search Console immediately after going live. For old domains with existing backlinks, Google often re-crawls and re-indexes pages within days of them coming back online.

For expired domain restores in particular, preserving the original URL structure is critical — which our restoration does automatically. If your old site had a post at /blog/how-to-bake-sourdough, the restored site has it at exactly the same URL.

Submit sitemap day one

Our restoration includes sitemap.xml. Submit it to Search Console immediately — this is the fastest path to re-indexing.

Original URL structure preserved

All pages restored to original URLs automatically. Backlinks pointing at old URLs remain intact.

Clean HTML, no bloat

No legacy trackers, no Wayback toolbar code, no charset errors. Clean HTML indexes better and faster.

Restore your old website back to life