How to See a Deleted Web Page Again

A news site quietly deletes an article. A company removes an old price list from its website. The terms of a service you use change, but the old version isn’t posted anywhere. Most people assume, “I can’t access that content anymore,” but in fact a huge portion of the internet is archived, and you can access that archive for free.

The tool that makes this possible is the Wayback Machine (web.archive.org). Run by the nonprofit Internet Archive organization, this service has been regularly saving snapshots of billions of web pages since 1996.

Wayback Machine homepage view — View of the web.archive.org homepage

How to Use It

Go to web.archive.org.
Type the address of the site you want to see into the search box (for example, the full link of a news article).
A calendar appears. Days with a green dot mean the site was archived on that date.
Click the date you want, and the site opens in front of you as it looked that day.

A page can have multiple archived dates, so it’s also possible to track day by day when a piece of content changed.

When You Might Use This Tool

To read a deleted news article or post. When a news site takes down a controversial piece of content, that content is usually still sitting in the archive.

To check a company’s old claims. Seeing what a company’s website said in the past, or how it presented its prices or warranty terms, can come in handy, especially in a dispute.

To assess a site’s trustworthiness. Checking how long a seemingly brand-new shopping site has actually existed, and what it looked like in the past, can clarify suspicions of fraud. If a site was publishing content on a completely different topic a few months ago and is now suddenly offering huge discounts, that’s a sign worth paying attention to.

For personal nostalgia. You can see again what a forum you used years ago, your own old website, or a service that no longer exists used to look like.

If You Want to Archive a Page Yourself

The Wayback Machine isn’t just for looking at the past — it can also be used to create evidence. For example, if you think a listing, a contract text, or a social media post might get deleted in the future, you can save that page to the archive right then and there using the “Save Page Now” feature.

Find the “Save Page Now” section on the web.archive.org homepage.
Paste the link of the page you want to save.
Click the “Save Page” button.

After this, the page remains permanently in the archive as evidence of what it looked like on that date.

Frequently Asked Questions

No. Archiving depends on how popular the site is and how often archiving bots visit it. Small, little-known sites may never have been archived, or only have a handful of dates on record.

Yes. The Internet Archive lets site owners request removal of their content from the archive, either through a robots.txt file or by direct request. That’s why archived records for some sites can be limited.

No. The Wayback Machine only archives publicly accessible pages that don’t require logging in.

Usually yes, but on some older pages the images or external links may not load properly. This depends on whether the related files were also archived separately at that time.