Our archive tool provides an interface to browser through historical versions of a website, with unique versions grouped by when the home page appeared to have changed. You are able to select a date in the past and view how the website looked on that particular date.

If you choose to acquire it, we will compile it into a zip file for you to download as you wish. If you host with us, you're also able to use that content on our own hosting servers, either by uploading it or clicking a button on your domain dashboard

Here's a breakdown of how to use the tool:

Choosing a Domain

You are able to acquire content via the domain dashboard for a domain, or using the standalone content gatherer which accepts a domain of your choice. You can find the standalone tool via the Tools navigation at the top of each page.

Enter the domain name into the tool and you will be given back dates and data about the domain when it is available.

Evaluating the Graph and Historical Dates

The dates returned are grouped on what the archive tool decides to be a unique home page.

The charts give you an indication of new URLs and new assets and the first date that they appear. This is useful for ascertaining when a completely (and potentially) new site was made live, lots of new content appeared, or a new design was used.

Take your time and have a look at the evolution of a website over the timeframe. You may notice how designs have evolved over the years, and domain parking pages appear and disappear. Pro tip: A parking page is typically a domain registrars holding page for an inactive domain and just contains ads, it's not content per se.

You may notice a Sandbox option that is turned on by default. This is a safety precaution that disabled Javascript and redirection amongst other things, like preventing frame busting javascript from redirecting you away from our site. You may need to turn it off if it is hindering your navigation of the site.

Personally, I aim to use the most up to date content of a website, or I'll choose an older version if the images, links and styling are broken on newer versions.

Once you are happy with your selection, click on Save Content and you'll be presented with a modal to confirm your selection. For small websites we may waive the credit fee altogether :-)

Confirm your selection and spidering will commence right away. You will receive an email and UI notification when content has been fetched.

Once that has been done, you are able to download the content alongside a custom-written .htaccess file that helps render pages that would otherwise not be able to be saved to a static file (in short, some URLs have characters in them that cannot be saved as regular filenames).

You will also be able to download a list of URLs with associated data to give you an overview of what is contained in the site as a whole.

If you choose to host your site with us, you are able to bulk upload the ZIP file within a couple of clicks, and edit the content as you please.