How to See Old Versions of Any WordPress Site

Do you want to see old versions of any WordPress site?

Seeing an old version of a WordPress site is not only fun, but it can provide you with design inspiration and give you access to content and media that are no longer available online.

In this article, we’ll show you how you can simply see older versions of any WordPress website.

Why See Old Versions of WordPress Sites?

The internet moves at hyperspeed. Beyond strolling through memory lane, there are many good reasons to view an older version of a WordPress website.

Most website elements will change over time. Websites go through redesigns, content gets deleted, and sometimes entire sites will go offline.

Being able to lookup an older version of a website can be very useful in a lot of situations.

• You need to retrieve older content from a website
• You want to recreate a resource that’s no longer online
• You need screenshots for a before and after website redesign
• You’re looking for design inspiration from old websites

With that said, let’s take a look at how to see older versions of any website.

How to See Old Versions of Any Website (3 Tools)

There are a few different online tools that create archives of websites. These tools take snapshots at different points in time and archive those website pages.

It works similar to your own WordPress backups except these are accessible to the entire internet.

Usually, these tools do archives by popularity and traffic. Some sites will have thousands of copies stored over time, while others might be impossible to find.

1. Wayback Machine

The Internet Archive is a digital library of the internet. It has a tool called Wayback Machine, which has over 554 billion archived web pages.

Wayback machine is a web archive that lets you find screenshots of old websites at different points in time.

To use this tool, navigate to the Wayback Machine website, enter the website URL you want to check, and click ‘Browse History’.

Then, it’ll show you a graph of the different dates where website copies were made.

You can click the top bar to sort by different years.

Below that, you’ll see a month by month calendar breakdown.

Next, click on a particular day, and there will be a popup to select the time.

You need to click the time you want, and it’ll load a cached copy of the website. You can right click to view the site in a new tab.

Keep in mind that not every link will work, and you won’t be able to navigate to every page since not every page will be cached.

This is generally an issue when sites are very large and have thousands of pages of content.