How to Restore a Website from Google’s Cache

Websites that take snapshots of other websites and store them in archives can be a valuable tool for users that have lost website data and don’t have a valid backup. One thing to keep in mind though is that these archiving services cannot access the information inside a website’s database, but would rather store the content or output of specific pages or files. This is mostly useful for static HTML sites or content, but can also be used to obtain data that was stored in a database but displayed on the website (such as a blog post in WordPress, etc).

First, do a Google site search for the domain by entering: site:domain.com

If/when the search results come up, find the page in question and click the “Cached” link. You can then view the page’s source from your browser by right-clicking and selecting “view source” or whatever similar option your browser may offer. Then, copy and paste the HTML code from the source into the corresponding file for your website. You may want to remove the first few lines in the source code that reference Google Cache, else it will show up on your website as well.

If you have a dynamic website (one that uses MySQL to store page content), you’ll have to be a little more selective. If you’re looking for the content of an article for example, you can copy and paste the text directly from the cache and enter it into your CRM or database.

Aside from Google Cache, there are some other services that may be storing historical snapshots of your website. Here are a few:

• www.archive.org
• www.archie-it.org
• www.webcitation.org
• www.internetfrog.com/mywebsite/archive/

In addition to the above, most popular search engines nowadays also have their own cache. While we’ve mainly referred to Google Cache, you can essentially use Yahoo or other similar search engine caching services to retrieve older copies of your website. This is useful because most search engines only store one cache instance at a time, so if one search engine does not have cached data of your website, others might.