Have you ever wanted to retrieve a long lost web page? Or maybe you created a new website and it’s not working as well as you would like and you want to recapture some of the content from a prior site.

In my case, I recently had two clients who moved the content I had developed to a new website platform. Then they asked me to review it. When this happens, invariably, mistakes are made.

For example, while reviewing a page, I realized something was wrong, but I wasn’t sure what specifically was off. I could look through my files to see if I had the original content in a Word document, but searching through files can be tedious. It would be so much easier to just refer to the prior site.

But the prior site is vanished from the web … or is it?

There’s an Internet archive that periodically visits websites and captures the site’s pages and preserves them.

Just go to The Wayback Machine. When you arrive at the site, enter your web address and you’ll be served a calendar that shows the days your website was archived. Click on a date before you launched your new site and … your old site will pop up.

How cool is that?

You aren’t limited to your home page either. You can click on any page of your website and see what’s there.

By the way, as of this writing The Wayback Machine claims “279 billion web pages saved over time.”

Easy Web Tip #240: There’s a way to see your prior website even though it’s no longer published on the Internet.