Services

Website restoration from web archive

Site is gone, no backups — we pull the latest version from the Wayback Machine, rebuild it, and put it back online on new hosting.

Timeline5 days

What's included

  • Extracting HTML, CSS, JS, images from Wayback Machine
  • Stitching a working version from snapshots across dates
  • Restoring structure: pages, menu, internal links
  • Cleaning up legacy code and trackers
  • Moving to current hosting with SSL
  • Adapting for modern browsers
  • Baseline SEO check: meta, sitemap, hreflang

Site is down, the host lost the database, the domain got reclaimed and returned — common stories. If the Wayback Machine has a recent working snapshot, we can pull the content from there and rebuild a functioning site.

When this works

  • The site was static or WordPress without heavy interactivity
  • The archive has reasonably complete snapshots — homepage and at least 70-80% of internal pages
  • Dynamic features (login, cart, search) can be rebuilt or dropped

When it does not work

  • The site was a JavaScript SPA — Wayback indexes those poorly
  • Content was behind login — never made it into the archive
  • Owner asked archive.org to remove the site via robots.txt

What is included

  • Snapshot audit in Wayback Machine plus a check of archive.today and Google cache
  • Asset download via wget or wayback-machine-downloader pinned to specific dates
  • Static build or deployment into WordPress/CMS
  • Code cleanup: removing third-party trackers, widgets, ad scripts
  • Deployment to new hosting plus Let's Encrypt SSL
  • Redirect rules from old URLs if anything moved
  • Sitemap, robots.txt, baseline schema.org

Technical stack

  • Extraction — wayback-machine-downloader, wpull, custom Python scripts for problem cases
  • HTML cleanup — BeautifulSoup to strip Wayback banners and trackers
  • Images — WebP/AVIF optimization, lazy loading
  • Hosting — chosen by load and budget
  • SSL — Let's Encrypt with auto-renewal