Why you need to archive your website

Most of the time it is important to show the latest information on your website but sometimes it is just as important to keep archived versions of your website or online content. It is important to realise that this isn’t a backup of your website.

This depending on your circumstances might need to be done for multiple reasons, such as complying with regulations to prove that some action was done at a particular time. If you are a financial organisation this will almost certainly be a legal requirement.

In this age of litigation, it is vital to have the evidence you need to fight the legal battles related to your online content. Perhaps because of copyright claims, or proving what the terms and conditions of your website were at a particular point in time. Or perhaps you need to prove to your clients that you displayed their promotional material on your website when promised.

Once a company reaches a certain age there is often a desire to showcase the journey of the company. But how do you do this for an online company? With a web archive, this shouldn’t be a problem, as visual records of how your website has changed over time will give you an ideal look back in time.

There is also a lot of data that is shown about your website that is only shown for a short time, be it the Google trends for your brand or Alexa rank.

Sometimes it is even more important to create a web archive of your main competitors. Have you had a sudden drop off in sales? Why is this happening? If you are keeping an archive of your competitor’s sites, you can see how their websites have changed over time. Perhaps they have a new special offer, or maybe they have re-designed their website to make it easy to use. Without knowing what has changed it will be more difficult to counteract their improvements.

So how do you go about creating a web archive, of what was online at a particular time? You could do it manually or write some software to do it. But it would need to be reliable and ensure that the results are backed up in multiple locations.

This is where GrabzIt’s Screenshot Tool comes in. It is easy to create a task, which will take screenshots of your target URL at a regular schedule or one-off. A screenshot can be saved in a large number of formats and comes with an extensive range of customization options. Do you automatically want to export your screenshots to another location such as Dropbox or FTP? Not a problem, GrabzIt has many export options.

Once a screenshot is created GrabzIt will back it up for three years in multiple separate locations. You can download any selection of these archived screenshots as a ZIP file whenever you want.