How can I recover the content of my lost website?

September 25, 2021November 6, 2021 Mazhar Iqbal

How can I recover the content of my lost website?

If your website is deleted or expired; you may ask yourself questions like, “How can I recover the content of my lost website?”
First of all, we are very sorry for all the trouble that you are facing due to the loss of your website. You are not alone who became the victim of the deletion or expiration of your website due to certain reasons.
This situation is worse for your business. You may lose your clients and hence revenue. Many people will think that they should have a backup of their site all the time, but the bitter reality is that you are losing a huge share of your business due to this mess.
Leaving the old site as abandoned and setting up a new site a not a great way to continue your business; you have options available to recover your lost site.
This article will guide you through the recovery process of your site. You can launch a more fast, reliable, flexible, and even more beautiful website. This is when you reproduce the same site as previous (structure, URL, content, etc.). You need to remember this is not an easy task.
If you feel some steps are confusing and you need help in the recovery of your site; you may contact us. We will be happy to explain and offer suggestions for the recovery of your site and business.

Steps to find content for a new site:

In this section, we will discuss the steps to build a new site as quickly as possible. The main focus will be using the old content of your lost site. We will explain how you find the old content, selecting your important content, and building the sitemap so a user can easily navigate to your site.

If you want to build a stunning website from scratch using old content; we can offer you our services. It will save your time and effort and hence your business will not be affected.

Finding the content of the old site:

There are 2 methods for finding the old content of your site that was ranked in Google and other search engines. One of the methods is using Google Search Console and the other is using plugin SEO Quake.

Google Search Console:

The Google Search Console is an ideal choice for finding the old content of your lost site. If you have set up Google Search Console, you can easily download indexed URLs of the lost site.

The detailed process is explained for your convenience.

Log in to the Google Search Console account of your site.
Navigate to the “Search Analytics Section”.
Select “Pages” in the filter.
Scroll down and at the bottom, click “Download”
Open the results in a spreadsheet.

You will see the links to your indexed URLs in Google. You can find the content and paste it into your newly developed site.

SEO Quake Extension:

You can install the SEO Quake extension for Google. It helps you to download all pages of your lost site from the search results in Google. Following are the steps involved in using this extension.

Install SEO Quake extension from Google Extensions.
In the Google search bar type “site:example.com”. Don’t include www or HTTPS.
Click SEO Quake extension, and then click “Export CSV”. In Google search results, go through every page and repeat the process to find all URLs.
Find all the results in a spreadsheet to see what you have got from the search.

With the help of Google Cache or Archive.org; you can also view a cached version of pages of your site. It is recommended to use these while fetching important content on your archived site.

Google Cache:

Although a site is deleted or expired, it must be there in the Google index. You need to follow these steps to download content from Google cache.

Navigate to Google.
In the search bar type “cache:example.com”. Don’t include HTTPS or www at the start of your domain.
If still, your site is present in the cache, you can download the content from the pages of your site.

Archive.org:

Wayback Machine is another way to see the old pages of your site. You need to do the following steps:

Open the official site of Wayback Machine.
In the search bar type the URL of the site, you would like to view the content.
Scroll down to the calendar.
Click on any highlighted date. On that particular date, the web archive has taken a screenshot of your site. Click on the time and you will see the cached version of your site.

Here you have 2 options. You can simply copy-paste the content of your archived site into a new site. Secondly, you can download the HTML files of your archived site and can live your previous site.

For this purpose, you need a dedicated service to download the HTML files of the archived site and integrate them into WordPress.

Google Analytics:

If you have Google Analytics on your site, it is very easy for you to see the statistics of your content. You can analyze the content, traffic source, user flow, etc. at your site. Follow these steps to get info about the content at your site.

Login to the Google Analytics account of your site
Go to Behavior à Site Content
Analyze “All Pages”, “Content drilldown”, “Landing Pages”, “Exit Pages”

Here you can have a review of the most popular content of your site. Download this content to start building your new site.

Restoring a WordPress website from Wayback Machine

September 18, 2021November 6, 2021 Mazhar Iqbal

Restoring a WordPress website from Wayback Machine

Restoring a WordPress website from Wayback Machine is possible but it can’t recover the whole site in the same way that a WordPress site backup can. There is a difference in the archive of both methods. In this article, we will explore; how a WordPress website can be archive from the Wayback Machine and a short touch to back up a WordPress site.

What is Wayback Machine?

In simple words, the Wayback Machine is a search engine like other search engines and a web spider. But unlike other search engines that return the answer to your queries, it returns the history of changes of a website that it has crawled from time to time.

If anyone wants to see the different versions of a site from different times; he needs to simply put the URL of the site in the Wayback Machine and it will show you a screen of different times that it has archived that particular site.

If you are curious to see how a website was 5 or 10 years ago, the Wayback Machine might have the specified version of your site. I have used the word “might” because of certain reasons.

As you know, the internet is a big place. The Wayback Machine has the capacity to store a lot of history of the internet. But there are limitations of it also. One of the main reasons is that your site is less popular. It crawls frequently popular sites while there is a chance that it crawls lesser-known sites less.

You can save your site to the Wayback Machine manually. You can do this by using the “Save Page Now” form available on the Home page of Wayback Machine.

Can I restore my site from Wayback Machine?

If you find your site on the web archive, what you see is the only front-end representation of the content of your site. The content is there but none of the plugins or theme settings are available on the web archive. You can restore the content available on the web archive in the form of HTML files.

Restoring the content from Wayback Machine depends on the condition; how your website’s content is on the web archive. If your aim is to the restoration of content only, you can copy, paste the content from the web archive and paste it to your current site.

The process becomes a bit longer if you don’t have a website available or starting with WordPress for the first time. The first thing is to have a WordPress site. For this purpose; you have to purchase a domain and hosting. Register the newly purchased domain of your choice at the hosting.

If you had an SEO plugin like Rank Math or Yoast in your archived website, you have to add these plugins manually to your site and do the SEO of your archived content again. Unfortunately, there is no way to get the data of a plugin from an archived site. This is only the front-end copy of the content that Wayback Machine keeps.

Backup of your site:

It is very important to keep a good backup of your site. Many plugins are available for taking the backup of your site. OnSiteWP has plans to include the offsite backup of your site. In case the server of your site crashed; you can have the backup of your site using the OnSiteWP plugin.

Summary:

The content available on the Wayback Machine has its own value. It can save you from rewriting the content that you had already written in the past. But it cannot be compared to a WordPress backup. In WordPress backup the theme and plugin settings of your site are also saved; the Wayback Machine doesn’t. Redundancy is key when disaster strikes.

5 Ways to Archive a Website | The Ultimate Guidance

September 4, 2021November 6, 2021 Mazhar Iqbal

5 Ways to Archive a Website

There are several options available in the market to archive a website; 5 ways are worth knowing. These ways are solutions based on their relative difficulty. If you feel that none of these solutions are working for you; dive into finding the right solution for your needs and you will definitely find one.

There are 5 Ways to Archive a Website:

Save a Single Page site to your local computer
Use an online archive service like Wayback Machine
Archive your WordPress site using DevKinsta
Install the WAIL (Web Archiving Integration Layer)
If you are comfortable using a command line, use Wget

Save a Single Page site to your local computer:

This is the simplest and straightforward solution to your needs. If you need to archive a single page only, the functionality is already in practically every browser in the market.

To start this procedure, open a browser of your choice. Type the URL of the site that you want to archive. After the loading of the page, navigate to the File menu of the browser. There you will find the Save Page As option.

Click the option to save the page; the browser will show a dialog box. Here you need to choose the name of your page. You can type yourself or can save the default option that the browser is showing.

Here you have to make sure that you are saving the entire page. It will preserve the site with the most functionality possible. If you save it as just the HTML document, you will lose many functionalities of the page that you saved.

Use an online archive service like Wayback Machine:

None article or tutorial is complete for archiving a website unless you come to know the method of archiving your deleted or expired website from Wayback Machine. The process is super simple.

First, you need to open the official website of Wayback Machine http://wayback.archive.org/. You will see a search bar. Here you have to paste the URL of the site that you want to download. Here you paste the URL of the site that you want to archive.

Hit enter. Scroll down. You will see different snapshots of your site taken by the Wayback Machine. Hover on that date and click the snapshot time. It will show you the look of the site at that particular date taken by Wayback Machine.

Copy URL from the URL bar. Now go to a service provider that is offering the service to archive your site. Navigate to Pricing & Order Form. Here paste that link that you copied from Wayback Machine.

If you want to integrate this site into WordPress, you need to ask service providers to integrate it into WordPress. Provide web host C-Panel details or if you have installed WordPress yourself, provide us WP login details.

Archive your WordPress site using DevKinsta:

For the creation and deployment of the WordPress site, DevKinsta is an essential tool. It also helps you to archive your Kinsta-hosted website.

In MyKinsta, you can create and download a backup.
Import the content of your site and database also.

You can carry out search-and-replace on the database of your site. It will change the URL name from your live site to your new local archive. You can open your archived site at DevKinsta and use it as though it was live.

Install the WAIL (Web Archiving Integration Layer):

The first step in this method is to download and install WAIL. A dedicated installer for the WAIL tool is available. As the program is written in Python, it uses the PyInstaller module).

Installation is much easier. Regardless of any operating system, the following points are involved in the installation of WAIL.

First of all, navigate to the site of WAIL.
Download the appropriate installer for the operating system of your PC.
You can unzip the file for the Windows version and can mount the DMG image for macOS.

For the macOS, there will be a resultant screen; you need to drag the app icon to your Application folder. For Windows users; the process is a bit different. Here you have to drag the unzipped folder to your root C:\ drive

Depending on the operating system of your PC, you can launch either WAIL.app or WAIL.exe.

Once WAIL is launched; you will see three options.

View an archive
Check the status of the archive
Archive a website.

At the first launch, you may see nothing in your archives. Enter the URL of your site that you need to archive. Clink Archive Now button.

WAIL will begin to crawl your website. The status of the crawl can be checked on the advanced > Heritrix tab.

When you are done, there will be a “Success” message. Now click the View Archive button available on the Basic Tab. Your archive site will open in a browser. You can view all the archived content of your site here.

If you are comfortable using a command line, use Wget:

In this method of archiving a site, you need few things before starting:

Command-line access to your computer
A command-line tool like Windows Command Prompt, or on macOS and Linux there should be Terminal
On your computer, there should be Wget installed.

It is likely to be installed on your operating system already. Using Wget is straightforward; once it is installed

wget "https://waybackdownloaders.com/" --warc-file="waybackdownloaders"

The above command line is used to download the site into index.html. You have to create a WARC file named waybackdownloaders.00000.warc.gz.

Wget is a very powerful tool. Many commands and options are available in it. You can make a complete mirror of your site using the –mirror command.

Summary (5 Ways to Archive a Website):

Fortunately, plenty of options are there to archive your site. However dedicated archiving tools are Wayback Machine, Heritrix, WAIL, and Wget. These are all robust solutions. These all offer standardized file formats to work.