How to archive websites

Let’s face it - nothing lasts forever, especially on the internet. This guide goes over how to take the powers of archival into your own hands so you can BYOL (Be Your Own Librarian).

Web archival

There are a few different archival sites you can use to archive a website.

Archive.org

Archive.org is the largest archive of the internet. If you visit this site, you can enter a URL and it will check for any instances in which that site has been archived in the past. It will show you a year-by-year timeline in the form of a calendar. Calendar days with colored bubbles indicate the site has been archived.

By default, when you archive a URL (like sadgrl.online), it will only archive that one URL - so, the homepage. Since most websites consist of many pages, this isn’t ideal for most use cases.

You don’t need an account to archive a site, but having one makes it a bit easier to keep a record of the sites you have archived. Accounts are free. When you’re logged in, Archive.org gives you the option to save outlinks which means it will attempt to archive a copy of every link that is linked on that initial page.

It’s worth noting that after a website has been archived, interactive elements (menus, tabs, carousels) often fail. Also, lazy-loaded content may be missing.

While Archive.org can be used to archive your own site, but it’s important to note that it will never be as good as downloading a backup of your site. It is very likely that an important page or image will not be archived.

Archive.org offers an extension called Wayback Machine for both Chrome and Firefox. These extensions allow you to archive a page you are currently viewing and easily access older archives from a submenu.

With this extension installed, if you land on a 404 page for a particular website and an archive exists for that page, it can automatically redirect you to the most recently archived version.

Archive.is

Another site you can use is Archive.is which is also mirrored at Archive.ph. This service archives a single page at a time. It does not automatically crawl and archive all linked subpages or assets beyond what is immediately visible on the URL you provide.

Archive.is also has a Firefox extension. It adds an button to your browser that allows you to easily archive a webpage you’re currently viewing. If the page has been recently archived, it will let you know and give you the option to save it again if you think it has changed since then. A link to install the extension can be found at the top right of the page.

Local archival

If you want to download a local copy of a website, you can try out HTTrack which is supported only on Windows, Linux, and Android. This software is free to use and downloads the site contents locally.