If you have ‘lost’ your website from a while ago and now you want to get it back, here is what you need to know about achieving that:

#1: Do you own the domain now?

A domain is not your website. A domain is just the ‘street address’ on the Web of where your website lives e.g. like google.com, facebook.com etc

A website however is the actual text, images and pages that then make up your website content, which sits on a domain.

If you have lost ownership of the domain that your website was on, you will either have to:

[a] negotiate with the current owner to buy it back (domain registrars like Namecheap and Godaddy offer this service but the fees are usually pretty steep and a direct approach is probably more likely to work), or 

[b] buy a new similar domain e.g. if the domain/site that you want to get back is tedsguitarshop.com but that is currently owned by someone else and they ain’t selling, think about domains like:

– tedsguitarshop.pro
– tedsguitarshop.club
– tedsguitarshop.net
– tedsguitarshop.co
– tedsguitarshop.online
– tedsguitarshop.us
– tedsguitarshop.live

or one of hundreds of other domain extensions now available.

#2: How do you get your old site files from archive.org?

Archive.org is an underfunded nonprofit trying to store most of the Web in a very, very basic form.

In general, site records from the past at archive.org have missing pages, missing images, broken links and wonky layouts.

However, most of the text and images are normally intact – check all the date records for best result! – and these can be used to restore the site.

BUT extracting all your files from archive.org’s Wayback Machine is very difficult without a tool like Wayback Rebuilder (you’re here – yay!).

So if you only want to extract the files for 1 site, you will need to:

[a] CHOOSE the Single Site Download option here – you can download any or all date records for 1 URL for THREE DAYS for just $15 – it’s a 3 day pass deal: