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.
