Restore a WordPress website from Wayback Machine Downloaders 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 archived from the Wayback Machine downloader and provide a quick guide 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, they need to simply put the URL of the site in the Wayback Machine Archive, and it will show them 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 web archive 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 the history of the internet. But there are limitations to 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 Internet Archive manually. You can do this by using the “Save Page Now” form available on the Home page of the Wayback Machine downloader.
Can I restore my site from the 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 available content on the web archive in the form of HTML files.
Restoring the content from the Wayback Machine downloaders depends on the condition of how your website’s content is in the web archive. If your aim is the restoration of content only, you can copy, paste the content from the web archive 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 with the hosting.
If you had an SEO plugin like Rank Math or Yoast on 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.
If you feel this process is long and takes up much of your time, you can place an order on our website Wayback downloaders & our team will restore your website, whether you want to restore the website design or content.
Backup of your site:
It is very important to keep a good backup of your website. Many plugins are available in the market for taking a backup of a WordPress website, such as Updraft – All-in-one migration, and more. OnSiteWP has plans to include the off-site backup of your site. In case the server of your site crashes, you can have a 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, the backup of the theme and plugin settings of your site is also saved; the Wayback Machine doesn’t. Redundancy is key when disaster strikes.