Setting Up Website Archiving

What Gets Archived

Screenshots of all of your website's pages.
The HTML source associated with each page.

(Scroll down for a list of website archiving requirements & limitations.)

How Website Archiving Works

Our website archiving works differently than archiving for other sources: Instead of automatically archiving new data daily like we do for social media and email, we recreate a complete archive of your entire website using the frequency you choose! You have a choice of:

Monthly (recommended) — This option creates ongoing monthly snapshots of your entire website.
Weekly (not recommended) — This option may be appropriate for websites like blogs that see frequent posts (more than once per week) if you require being able to manage weekly snapshots of your entire website.
Daily (not recommended) — This option should only be selected if your website consistently publishes new content every day and you require being able to manage daily snapshots of your entire website. You must also ensure that your hosting provider does not enforce any rate-limiting or other restrictions that might prevent us from daily archiving.

Adding a Website Source

Click on your "Websites" tab.
Click the blue "Add Website" button in the top right corner.
A pop-up screen will appear. Enter in the URL for the website you'd like archived.
Choose your archiving frequency. We strongly recommend keeping the default of Monthly unless your website consistently sees content updates on a weekly or daily basis and you require being able to manage more frequent snapshots of your entire website.
Click "Create".

After adding your website, an initial archive will be kicked off automatically. You can access your current and previous website archives at any time by clicking on the "Downloads" tab next to "Websites".

You can always view when your next automatic website archive will occur by checking the date under "Next Archive".

Editing a Website Source

Click on your "Websites" tab.
Click the white "Edit" button for the website you want to edit.
A pop-up screen will appear, where you can edit the Frequency or Status of the website.
We recommend a status of Monthly unless your website consistently sees content updates on a weekly or daily basis and you require being able to manage more frequent snapshots of your entire website.

Requirements and Limitations

Since nontrivial changes to your website's design or to your hosting provider's back-end setup may cause issues with website archiving, we recommend reviewing your website archives from time to time to ensure that they are working as expected.

If things don't look quite right, it's usually due to issues with one of the following:

Your website and its pages must be publicly navigable by our text-based website crawler, and must load promptly and properly in a modern web browser such as Chrome.
Your website and its hosting provider must not block, throttle, or otherwise limit requests from our archiver. For example: If your hosting provider is utilizing services such as Cloudflare's website protection, it must be configured to allow our requests.
Your website must present its page content to a web browser all at once during the initial page load, and must not require any user interaction with the page.
Only HTML pages (the usual website page type) are archived.
If your web server sends HTTP cache validation headers with its responses, our website archiver assumes that they are trustworthy.
Only pages that share the same "parent" domain/URL that you provided when adding the website source will be archived. For example: If you provided the URL https://example.com/blog/ then only pages within the /blog/ sub-folder will be archived.

If you need an additional website or blog archived, please reach out to archive@xyplanningnetwork.com.