Rebuilding a site from a web archive

You have bought a domain whose site is gone. The pages were indexed for years, they are still sitting in public web archives, and you want them back. That is what this screen does.

Sites → Restore, or the Restore tab inside a site you have already created.

The two sources, and they are not the same job

Web archive (Wayback Machine) rebuilds a site from public snapshots taken over the years. Use it for a domain you have bought whose site no longer exists anywhere you control.

An archive of an existing site is a file you already have — an export from another host, or a copy you made. Use it when you are moving something in rather than recovering something lost. If the site is live somewhere else and you want it moved, read Moving an existing site to us instead; we do that one for you.

What happens after you start it

Give it the old domain, then pick which snapshot — the archive usually holds many, taken on different days, and they are not equally complete. A day close to the site's last healthy period is usually better than the most recent one, because the final snapshots of an abandoned domain often catch it already broken or parked.

It then runs through: finding snapshots, fetching, building, deploying, verifying. Large rebuilds keep going in the background — you can close the page. The top-level Restore screen lists every rebuild running across your account, which the per-site tab cannot show you.

What a rebuild can and cannot bring back

⚠️ A web archive holds what a crawler could see, and nothing else. So expect:

• Pages, text and images — generally yes, for anything that was publicly reachable.
• Anything behind a login — no. It was never crawled.
• Forms, carts, comments and search — the page comes back; the working feature does not.

There was no database in the archive to take.

• Pages nobody linked to — often missing, because the crawler never found them.

⭐ Treat the result as a recovered site to review, not a finished one. Open it, walk the main pages, and expect to fix links and replace a few images.

If it does not find anything

A domain with no snapshots, or only a parked-page snapshot, cannot be rebuilt — there is nothing archived to rebuild from. Try an earlier date first. If several dates come back empty, the site was probably never crawled, and no tool can recover it.