In case you lost your website backups, and there is no website backup on your local machine or remote server with your web hosting. How can you get back your website or its pages? In this article, we will talk about how webmasters can use Google’s cache to restore your web pages.
Steps to restore your website from Google Cache
- Open google.com on your web browser;
- Search google for site:yourdomain.com.
All your indexed web pages by Google should be displayed. See below screenshot.
This is Google’s cache of http://www.betterhostreview.com/. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on 26 Feb 2014 10:19:26 GMT. The current page could have changed in the meantime. Learn more
Tip: To quickly find your search term on this page, press Ctrl+F or ⌘-F (Mac) and use the find bar.
In this example, we found the web page copy of the home page betterhostreview.com through Google cache. You can see the full page with all the content has been stored by Google, including text, links, images, and so on. You can copy all the text content and save to your computer, right click on the images and download them onto your computer. You can also quickly select and copy all the text by click the Text-only version, then Google cache will only display all the text, you can select them all, copy and paste them to a Word, Notepad document.
Other cached web pages can also be found too. You need to download them one by one. There is no such a function allows you to download all the cached pages in one time.
If you need the backup of a specific page, you can just search the web page URL in Google, and download the page from Google cache. See below screenshot.
Additional Tips about Website or web pages restore via Google Cache:
- When search google for your website content, using the site index, make sure not to insert any blank between the index and your domain name.
- At the top of the page, Google will display a message to tell you when the web page has been cached by Google so you know whether it is the latest version you need or not. If you have not made any changes significantly after the cache date, then it is safe to just download the web page copy from Google cache. The message is similar to: This is Google’s cache of http://www.yourdomain.com/. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on …GMT.
- Sometimes you may want to restore not only the content (mainly text and images), but also the styles, you can the view the page source of the Google cached page in your web browser. You can right-click and choose View Page Source. You can select the copy section you need and paste them in a web page editor for further editing. For example, you can create a new page with Dreamweaver, then copy these HTML code into the new page under the HTML code mode. Then try to preview the page in a web browser see if the styles can be rendered properly.
- If you build your website with static HTML pages, they will be much easier to be restored from Google cache. If you have a dynamic website, for example, a WordPress site based on MySQL and PHP, you can’t simply copy and paste the text directly from the cache and enter it into your CRM or database. Mostly you can only restore the web page text and images and then add them to your newly create web pages.
- Another tip when you restore web pages from Google cache, is the links, file names and file directories, it is recommended to keep them the same when creating your new website. Since Google has indexed all these web pages and their unique URLs already. If you rebuild website with new page names and file structure and URLs, you may have a lot of 404 errors from Google search which is bad for SEO.
