How to See Old Versions of a Website (Step by Step)

Here is how to see old versions of a website: go to web.archive.org, type the site’s address, and pick a year and a date on the calendar. Each highlighted date is a snapshot the Wayback Machine saved, and clicking it opens the page as it looked then. If the site is not there, other web archives, national library collections and your own records may still hold a copy. This guide walks through the Wayback Machine step by step, shows how to compare versions, list every old page of a site and save what you find, and covers what to do when no old version exists.

How to see old versions of a website in the Wayback Machine

1. Open the Wayback Machine. Go to https://web.archive.org/. The Internet Archive also has an official guide to using the Wayback Machine.
2. Enter the full address. Type the page you want, for example example.com for the home page or example.com/about for a specific page, and press Enter.
3. Read the timeline. The bar chart at the top shows how many captures exist per year. Click a year to load its calendar.
4. Pick a date. Circles on the calendar mark days with captures; larger circles mean more captures that day. Hover to see the times, then click one.
5. Browse the old page. The capture opens with a toolbar at the top. Links inside the page take you to the nearest capture of the linked page, which may be from a different date.
6. Move through time. Use the arrows in the toolbar to jump to the previous or next capture of the same page.

Blue circles usually indicate normal captures, while other colours indicate redirects or errors that the crawler recorded. If a capture shows an error page, try a nearby date.

Find every old page of a site, not just the home page

The calendar works one URL at a time. To see which pages of a site were ever archived, use the URL listing:

• Enter the domain with a wildcard, such as example.com/*, in the Wayback Machine search. It lists captured URLs under that domain, with the first and last capture dates for each.
• Use the filter box to narrow the list, for example to blog or .pdf.
• For large sites or exports, the CDX API returns the same information as plain text or JSON. Our Wayback Machine API guide shows the queries, and the article on finding historical URLs to rebuild a sitemap explains how to turn that list into something useful.

Compare two old versions of a page

When you need to know what changed, not just what a page looked like:

• Use the Wayback Machine’s Changes view. From a page’s capture list, the “Changes” option lets you choose two captures and highlights the differences in text.
• Open two captures side by side in separate browser tabs for a quick visual comparison of layout and images.
• Compare source code. Add id_ after the timestamp in a capture URL to see the original HTML without the archive toolbar, then paste two versions into any text-diff tool.

This is useful for checking when a price, a policy, a menu item or a page title changed, or for recovering wording that was later edited away.

Address variants: why an old version seems to be missing

The archive stores captures under the exact address the crawler visited. If you see “not archived”, try:

• with and without www.
• http:// instead of https:// (many older captures predate HTTPS)
• with and without a trailing slash, and with index.html or index.php
• older domains the business used before a rebrand

These variants find old versions surprisingly often. If none work, see our checklist for when a website is not in the Wayback Machine.

Other places to view old versions of websites

The Wayback Machine is the largest public web archive, but not the only one. Depending on the site, try:

• archive.today (archive.ph), which holds pages people saved manually, often news and social posts.
• National and university web archives, such as the UK Web Archive, the Library of Congress web archives, Arquivo.pt and others, which focus on sites from their regions or subject areas.
• Common Crawl, a large open dataset of crawled pages aimed at researchers. It is not a browsing interface, but it can contain pages that other archives missed.
• Your own records: a CMS revision history, an old hosting backup, a developer’s Git repository, email newsletters or PDF exports. If you owned the site, these are often more complete than any public archive.

Google’s search results no longer offer a “cached” copy link, so search engines are not a reliable way to see old versions any more. If you only need the most recent stored copy of one page, see how to view a cached page without Google cache. Our comparison of Wayback Machine alternatives covers the public archives in more detail.

Save an old version you have found

Viewing a capture is not the same as keeping it. Captures can be hard to navigate offline, and you may need a working copy later. Options, from simplest to most complete:

1. Screenshot or print to PDF for a visual record of a single page. Note the capture URL, which includes the date.
2. Save the original HTML by opening the id_ version of the capture and using “Save page as”.
3. Download many pages with a Wayback downloader that fetches the captured files and rebuilds the folder structure. Our guide to downloading a website from the Wayback Machine covers the tools and the clean-up needed afterwards.

Looking for old social media posts rather than a website? See the Twitter Wayback Machine guide or the Facebook Wayback Machine guide. Go slowly when downloading. The Internet Archive limits heavy traffic, and fast tools quickly run into “429 Too Many Requests” errors.

What old versions can and cannot show you

• They show public pages as the crawler saw them. Text, layout and many images are usually there.
• Some parts are often missing. Images, fonts, embedded videos and interactive features may not have been captured, so a page can look broken even though the text is complete.
• Nothing behind a login. Customer areas, admin panels, private pages and anything that needed a password were not archived.
• No databases. An old version shows the page a server produced, not the database, orders or user accounts behind it.
• Not every date. Small sites may have a handful of captures across many years. The version you remember may fall between two captures.

When you need more than a look

Seeing an old version answers “what did it look like?”. Knowing how to see old versions of a website is the first step; getting that version back as files you can host, edit or hand to a developer is a bigger job. If you need the old site as a working copy, our Wayback Machine download service delivers the captured pages as a cleaned HTML ZIP with links fixed. If you are not sure how much of the old site survived, request a free archive check and we will tell you what the archive holds before you decide anything.

Frequently asked questions

Is it free to see old versions of a website?

Yes. The Wayback Machine and most public web archives are free to browse without an account.

How far back can I see old versions of a website?

The Wayback Machine’s captures go back to 1996. How far back a particular site goes depends on when it was first crawled.

Why is the old version missing images?

The crawler did not always capture every image, or captured it on a different date. Try nearby captures, or open the image URL directly in the archive.

Can I see an old version of a website that was deleted?

Often, yes, if it was public and was crawled before it disappeared. Deleting a site does not remove existing captures, although an owner can ask the archive to exclude a site.

Can I see old versions of a page behind a login?

No. Archives only capture what was publicly reachable, so members-only and admin pages are not available.