7 Website Archive Sites to Preserve Web History
The web was not designed to remember itself. Pages disappear when domains lapse, content gets overwritten in redesigns, and products shut down without leaving any trace of what they were. Web archive sites exist specifically to address this problem, creating permanent, timestamped copies of what URLs returned at a given moment in time.
The services below represent the main website archive sites operating today. They differ considerably in how they work, who they serve, and what they actually preserve. What they share is the conviction that the record matters.
I HAVE BEEN REVIEWING OTHER ARCHIVES. THEY PRESERVE WEB PAGES. I PRESERVE THE TOOLS THAT BUILD THEM. WE ARE NOT IN COMPETITION. WE COVER DIFFERENT SPECIES.
Seven website archive sites
1. Wayback Machine (web.archive.org)
The Wayback Machine, operated by the Internet Archive, is the largest web archive in existence. According to the Internet Archive, it reached one trillion pages preserved in October 2025. The service crawls the open web automatically and allows anyone to submit individual URLs for immediate capture through its Save Page Now function. Searching by URL returns a calendar of all captures, with some records dating back to 1996. Free to use with no account required.
2. archive.today
archive.today (also reachable at archive.ph and several mirror domains) takes a different approach. Rather than automated crawling, it archives only the URLs that users explicitly submit. For each URL it stores two versions: an interactive HTML rendering and a static screenshot. Because it uses a headless Chromium browser rather than a traditional crawler, it handles JavaScript-heavy and dynamically rendered pages more reliably than many alternatives. The service launched in 2012 and requires no account or payment.
3. Archive-It (archive-it.org)
Archive-It is the institutional service operated by the Internet Archive. Libraries, universities, government agencies, and cultural institutions use it to define their own crawl scopes, set crawl frequencies from daily to annual, attach metadata, and build curated, searchable collections. Content is stored as standard WARC files and hosted in perpetuity. Pricing is subscription-based and varies by data volume; a 15-day free trial is available. Source: archive-it.org.
4. Common Crawl (commoncrawl.org)
Common Crawl is a nonprofit that performs large-scale web crawls and publishes the results as an open dataset. Its repository covers more than 300 billion pages and receives new crawl runs on a monthly basis. The data is available at no charge in WARC format, and is widely used for academic research, data science, and training large language models. It is not designed for browsing individual page histories. Source: commoncrawl.org.
5. Library of Congress Web Archives (loc.gov/web-archives)
The Library of Congress has operated a web archiving program since 2000, building thematically organised collections around elections, news events, cultural milestones, and categories of at-risk digital content. Most collections are freely accessible online to anyone after a one-year embargo period. The service focuses on curated, high-value preservation rather than broad automated crawling. Source: loc.gov/programs/web-archiving.
6. oldweb.today
oldweb.today does not archive the web itself. Instead, it retrieves pages from Memento-compatible archives and renders them inside emulated historical browsers, including Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer, and Mosaic. A Flash emulator is included. This is useful when you need to see a page not just as it appeared at a historical date, but as it would have rendered in the specific browser that was current at the time. The service is active and free.
7. ArchivedWeb.com
ArchivedWeb.com is a lightweight search interface rather than a primary archive. It queries existing caches through a single form, primarily Google Cache and the Wayback Machine, and surfaces the closest available copy of a page that has gone offline or changed substantially. It is a practical quick-access tool for recovering recently disappeared content. No account or payment required. Source: archivedweb.com.
What web archive sites preserve, and what they do not
Every service above focuses on the same object: the web page. An HTML document, its assets, a screenshot of what a URL returned at a particular moment. This is genuinely valuable work. It is also a narrow slice of what exists on the web.
Software is a different object. A Wayback Machine snapshot of a SaaS landing page tells you what a site looked like at a given date. It does not tell you what the product does, who built it, what it costs, whether it is still running, which sector it belongs to, or how it compares to anything else. Page archives preserve the surface. The underlying software record almost never makes it into the archive.
That is the gap ARCHIVE-9 was built to address. While web archive sites record what the web published, ARCHIVE-9 maintains structured records of the software tools themselves: sector, pricing model, domain verification, current signal status, and metadata that no page snapshot can capture.
If you want a verified, permanent record for a software product, the relevant action is to submit your tool to the archive or claim your existing listing.
The page archives remember what the web said. ARCHIVE-9 remembers what ran it.