How to See Old Versions of Any Website (2026 Guide)

Websites change constantly. Prices move, policies get rewritten, product pages vanish and whole companies redesign overnight. The good news is that most of the public web has been quietly copied, page by page, for almost thirty years. If you know where to look, you can see what almost any page said last week, last year or in 1999.

This guide covers four ways to do it, from the manual route through the Wayback Machine to a one-click check across eight archives. Pick the one that fits how often you need it.

Why old versions of websites exist at all

A web archive is a library that crawls public pages and stores a copy each time it visits. Every stored copy is called a capture (or snapshot) and is labelled with the exact time it was taken, usually as a 14-digit timestamp like 20240314093000. Open a capture and you see the page as the crawler saw it at that moment — text, links, images and, often, the layout.

The largest is the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, which has been capturing since 1996. But it is not the only one. Archive.today saves pages on demand, national libraries such as the British Library and the National Library of Australia keep their own collections, and Common Crawl publishes a monthly open crawl. Each has gaps the others fill, which is why checking more than one archive matters.

Method 1: Browse the Wayback Machine calendar

This is the classic route and it still works well for popular pages.

1. 1

   Open the Wayback Machine

   Go to web.archive.org and paste the full address of the page into the search box.

2. 2

   Pick a year

   The bar chart across the top shows how many captures exist per year. Taller bars mean more snapshots to choose from.

3. 3

   Pick a day

   Days with captures are circled on the calendar. Hover a circle to see the times, then click one to open that version.

4. 4

   Move through time

   Inside a capture, the toolbar at the top lets you step to the previous or next capture without going back to the calendar.

You can skip the search box entirely by typing a URL pattern straight into your address bar: web.archive.org/web/*/example.com/pricing lists every capture of that page, and web.archive.org/web/2015/example.com jumps to the capture closest to 2015.

Method 2: Check the other web archives

If the Wayback Machine has nothing, or only a broken copy, other archives frequently do. Archive.today is especially good at paywalled and script-heavy pages because it renders them like a browser. Ghostarchive is strong on video and social pages. The UK Web Archive and Trove have deep coverage of British and Australian sites.

Doing this by hand means eight tabs and eight copies of the same URL. That is exactly the chore the next method removes.

Method 3: Check every archive in one click

Web Archive Viewer is a free browser extension for Chrome, Firefox and Edge that does the lookup for you. Open the popup on any page and it shows one card per archive with the number of captures, the first and last capture dates, and buttons for the latest and oldest copies.

1. 1

   Install the extension

   Add it from the store for your browser. No account is needed for any of the lookup tools.

2. 2

   Open any page and press Alt+Shift+A

   Or click the toolbar icon. The current URL is already filled in — even if you are on a Wayback capture, which is unwrapped back to the original address.

3. 3

   Read the cards

   Each archive card tells you whether it has the page, how many captures and the date range. A line at the top sums it up, for example “archived on 3 of 4 checked archives”.

4. 4

   Open a copy, or all of them

   Click a card to open that archive's copy. Search All opens every archive in background tabs at once.

Want to go straight to the Wayback history without the popup? Alt+Shift+W jumps from any page to its Wayback Machine calendar. And if nothing has been archived yet, Archive now asks the Wayback Machine, Archive.today or Ghostarchive to capture it today.

Method 4: Jump to a specific date

Often you don't want *any* old version — you want the version from a particular day: the day a policy changed, the day before a product launch, the date quoted in a news story. Each archive answers this differently, which makes it slow to do by hand.

In Web Archive Viewer, the Snapshot by date tool takes a date (or a quick pick such as “1 year ago”) and shows, for every archive, the capture closest to that day with how far off it is. Click a row to open it. For browsing around a date, the Timeline shows a year strip with real capture counts, then a month grid, then every capture by day across the archives, with filters for pages, redirects and errors.

What if a site has no old versions?

• Try the variants. http:// vs https://, with and without www., and with or without a trailing slash are often stored as different URLs. The extension's Domain history tool checks these variants for you.
• Try the home page. Deep pages are captured less often than home pages. Starting at the root and clicking through a capture frequently reaches the page you want.
• Look for the site, not the page. A whole-domain view lists every URL an archive holds for that site, which helps when the page moved. See how to find every archived URL on a domain.
• Check robots and exclusions. Some owners ask archives to hide their captures. In that case one archive may show nothing while another still has copies.
• Save it now for next time. If a page matters to you, capture it today. Our guide on archiving a page permanently explains which archive to use.

Going further: what changed between versions

Seeing an old version is usually the first step. The next question is *what is different*. You can open two captures side by side and read them, but a text diff is faster and more reliable. Our guide on comparing two versions of a web page walks through it, and historical SEO analysis shows how to track titles, headings and word counts across years.

Frequently asked questions