The Old Site You Should Keep a Copy Of

What usually happens to the old site

It runs alongside the new one for a few weeks, then somebody notices the hosting is still being billed and cancels it.

Sometimes there is a backup, held by the host that was just cancelled.

A year later a question arrives that only the old site can answer, and the answer is gone, along with everything else that was on it.

Why you will want it

Not for nostalgia, and not to put it back.

The questions that come up are practical and impossible to predict individually, while being entirely predictable as a category.

What did our terms say in 2019. What was the price of that service when this customer signed. Where did that page live, because a partner is still linking to it. What was the wording of the guarantee we published. Who was listed on the team page when this contract was signed.

Each is answerable in thirty seconds with an archive and not at all without one.

The three things worth keeping

• A full technical copy: all files and the database.
• A readable copy: the pages as they appeared, browsable offline.
• A content export: the text and images in a plain, portable form.

They serve different purposes and the second is the one people skip, which is unfortunate because it is the one that answers questions quickly.

A database backup proves nothing to a customer. A page you can open and read does.

The readable copy is the useful one

A crawler can save an entire site as flat files that open in a browser with no server, no platform, and no software licence.

The result is a folder you can open in five years on a machine that has never heard of the platform your site was built on.

That property matters more than it sounds. A database backup from a platform three major versions out of date is technically complete and practically unreadable without significant effort.

Run the crawl before the switch, while the old site is still live and complete.

Where to keep it

Somewhere with no connection to your hosting, your domain, or the account you are about to cancel.

Cloud storage you control, an external drive, or both, which is better.

The failure mode to design against is a single account: if losing access to one login loses the archive as well as everything else, the archive is not doing its job.

Label the folder with the site name and the date the copy was taken, because in four years nobody will remember which of two archives is which.

Keep the records, not only the pages

Some of the most valuable material is not in the pages at all.

Form submissions and enquiry records held inside the old system, which are often the only record of who contacted you and when.

Customer accounts and order history, if the site had them.

Published reviews and testimonials with their dates and names attached.

And the analytics history, which will eventually be deleted by the provider and cannot be recovered. Export the key reports as files rather than trusting the account to hold them indefinitely.

A worked example

A contractor was in a dispute about the scope of a warranty, eighteen months after rebuilding their site.

The customer said the website had promised a ten-year guarantee at the time of the contract. The contractor believed it had always said five.

The old site had been deleted with the hosting account four months after launch.

The public web archive had captured the homepage twice and none of the service pages, so the relevant wording was simply not recorded anywhere.

They settled on terms they considered unfavourable, largely because they could not demonstrate what had been published.

A crawl before the switch would have taken twenty minutes and produced a dated, readable copy of every page.

Do not leave it running instead

An easier-sounding alternative is to leave the old site online at a subdomain rather than archiving it.

This is a mistake for the reasons that apply to any second copy of your site: it can be found, it competes with the real site, and it is an unmaintained installation that will accumulate security problems nobody is watching.

An archive is a folder of files that nothing can reach and nothing can exploit. A parked old site is a live liability.

If you must keep it running briefly, put it behind a password and set a date to take it down.

How long to keep it

Longer than feels necessary, because the cost is a few gigabytes and the questions arrive years later.

Contract disputes, warranty claims, and tax or regulatory questions all operate on multi-year timescales.

Where your industry has record-keeping requirements, published claims and terms are plausibly part of that, and the sensible default is to match whatever period applies to your other business records.

For most small businesses, seven years is a reasonable rule and storage is not the constraint it once was.

The counter-case

Keeping everything indefinitely is not costless, and there is a genuine argument on the other side.

An archive containing customer records, enquiry histories, and account data is personal information you are now holding, and holding it forever conflicts with the principle of keeping personal data no longer than necessary.

The workable split is to treat the two halves differently: keep the published pages, terms, prices, and marketing claims for a long period, since they are your own statements, and apply your normal retention policy to anything containing customer data.

This is a general description rather than legal advice, and the specifics depend on where you operate and what sector you are in.

Before you cancel the hosting

1. Crawl the live old site into a readable offline copy.
2. Take a full file and database backup.
3. Export enquiry records and any account data.
4. Export the analytics reports you would miss.
5. Store it twice, away from your hosting account.
6. Label it with the site name and date.
7. Set a retention date for anything with customer data in it.

An hour, once, and it is the cheapest insurance in the entire rebuild.

Backups that were never tested are covered in backups nobody has tested.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.