To give you an idea of how thorough an archive this is, the Wayback Machine has saved over 19,700 copies of the Elegant Themes website. If you click on a specific year within that graph, you’ll be able to access individual copies of the site using a calendar: The Wayback Machine will show you a graph that tracks how often copies of that website were saved over the years. To get started, enter the URL of the website you want to check out. If you’re looking to kill a little time, the Internet Archive even hosts emulated versions of old games that you can play right from your browser:Īs far as websites go, the Internet Archive stores over 448 billion pages, and you can navigate them using its Wayback Machine tool: The Internet Archive is a nonprofit organization, which is dedicated to building a digital library of websites, books, audio recordings, videos, images, and even software. Let’s check out some of these services and what they have to offer. That means you can end up with an archive that saves thousands of copies of your website over time, depending on its popularity. In most cases, they take ‘snapshots’ of specific sites and pages upon request. There are a surprising number of services that store or cache old copies of websites. 3 Tools You Can Use to See Old Versions of Websites Internet archives fulfill a similar function to libraries, enabling us to peek into the past and see how things have changed over time. If your Internet Service Provider (ISP) or government censors parts of the web, you might be able to get past those barriers and look at archived sites.īeyond the more practical reasons, it’s essential that we keep a record of the web as it was and is today. Having access to old versions of websites also enables you to circumvent censorship in some cases. For example, if one of your favorite websites goes offline, you should be able to find a stored copy of it around the web:
More importantly, however, internet archives enable you to see information that has been lost to time. You can find design inspiration in old websites, and get access to media files that are no longer available. It has been around since 2008, and as you might imagine, a lot of things have changed since its early days:īeing able to peek into the past is incredibly helpful.