One of the few things you want to think about when launching a new site is what would happen if it suddenly got deleted or lost. While its not a common thing to happen, I can definitely tell you it does sometimes.
Perhaps you think you’re doing the right thing in updating a WordPress theme, and suddenly the site has been reverted back to the original version. Or maybe your hosting company had a server go down and the backups you thought existed don’t. Or maybe your assistant just accidentally deleted your home page.
Things happen, and sometimes you can’t control it.
Most of the time your server will have backups, whether its daily or weekly or maybe even monthly, but when that fails, how would you get your site back to normal?
Let me introduce you to Archive.org’s Wayback Machine. Archive.org is a website/app started in 1996 and essentially archives digital media for safe keeping. One of its branches is the Wayback Machine which archives websites. They do this naturally, potentially scanning your website multiple times a year and keeps it in its archives. The last count estimates that they have approximately 466 Billion pages.
Multiple times I’ve found myself using this service to see what websites looked like 10 or even 20 years ago. Most are very funny to see. Especially sites that are well known and you can go back and see where they started. Want to see what Mashable looked like in 2005? See it here: http://web.archive.org/web/20051102042852/http://mashable.com/?
But beyond the entertainment value, this archive system has great benefits for your online business. You can use this system to archive your brand new site for future reference and as a backup. Maybe you’ve written a great landing page and want to make sure you don’t lose the content. Maybe you now have 50 blog posts and want to ensure they’ll be available if the site happens to go down.
You simple need to go to https://archive.org/web/ and enter your URL in the ‘Save Page Now’ area to add it to the Archive.org’s index.
Once its indexed, your site will live forever on their platform, letting you know the content will be safe. It’ll also be crawled randomly from now on, archiving different versions of it. This could save you much grief if anything ever happens to your own site. Take my word for it.