LH Wayback Machine

Description

LH Wayback Machine integrates your website with the Internet Archive to create easy-to-view snapshots of your site over time, giving you a fully navigable visual history of the changes you’ve made.

The plugin gives you some handy tools to easily trigger and view snapshots:

• Automatically creates a Wayback Machine snapshot when you update your content.
• Automatically creates a Wayback Machine snapshot of archived content.

LH Wayback Machines automated functionality works for the following content types:

• Posts
• Pages
• Custom Post Types
• Categories
• Tags
• Custom Taxonomies

This means that whenever you edit/save one of these content types, a snapshot of the corresponding front-end page will be archived via the Wayback Machine. As you update your content, the Wayback Machine will automatically keep a visual history of your changes.

Like this plugin? Please consider leaving a 5-star review.

Love this plugin or want to help the LocalHero Project? Please consider making a donation.

Installation

1. Upload the entire lh-wayback-machine folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory.
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
3. That is it (there is no need for configuration)

FAQ

Will this handle old content?

Yes it will, in fact this is the main advantage of this plugin. This plugin will detect old content that has not been archived and create a queue to send it to the wayback machine

Why did you write this plugin?

Because I liked Mickey Kay’s Archiver plugin but I wanted something that did not need configuration and runs in the background.

How does this plugin work?

When the plugin is activated a queue of old content is created and this is sent off the wayback machine periodically via cron. Any change to your content is also detected, so new or modified content is also queued to be sent to the archive.

How can I see if this plugin is working?

The plugin creates a column in the posts, pages, and taxonomies screens with the date the last time the wayback machine was pinged. By clicking on this date you can view the most recently archived content.

What is something does not work?

LH Wayback Machine, and all https://lhero.org plugins are made to WordPress standards. Therefore they should work with all well coded plugins and themes. However not all plugins and themes are well coded (and this includes many popular ones).

If something does not work properly, firstly deactivate ALL other plugins and switch to one of the themes that come with core, e.g. twentyfirteen, twentysixteen etc.

If the problem persists pleasse leave a post in the support forum: https://www.ads-software.com/support/plugin/lh-wayback-machine/ . I look there regularly and resolve most queries.

What if I need a feature that is not in the plugin?

Please contact me for custom work and enhancements here: https://shawfactor.com/contact/

Reviews

Works Well

novakpeter June 7, 2022

All URLs are archived, it works.

Proactive & Automated Wayback Machine (Archive.org) Archiving

KZeni September 23, 2020

This plugin does a great job to help make sure a site is more likely to be archived and that the archive is more complete at web.archive.org than just letting the Wayback Machine passively crawl & archive the web. It helps make sure changes are also archived as updates are made for a more thorough history of a site as well. Setup & implementation is very quick & easy to use. As this plugin is more likely to ask more of archive.org’s Wayback Machine effort, I do suggest highlighting the option to donate to Archive.org via donate link (in addition to the donation for support of the plugin itself; but the plugin couldn’t exist without the service’s ongoing support.)

The las pocket

AlfonsoAB June 19, 2020

When you are in the urgent need of something you’ve lost of sight, it’s always in the last pocket. The Internet Archive is this last and lifesaver pocket.

Simple and does the job!

multiformeingegno June 4, 2020

I was looking for something like this. It just works! Would be amazing to also be able to save monthly/yearly archives

Essential for preservation!

kgagne April 13, 2020 1 reply

I’m a huge fan of the Internet Archive, the Wayback Machine, and WordPress. This plugin is essential for anyone interested in integrating those tools and preserving those sites. I love that it shows if a post or page is queued to be archived, if it already has, and a link to the last snapshot. Worst case scenario, if you don’t have other backups of your site, these snapshots can be used to rebuild your site in the event of a catastrophe. ?? The only three caveats I need to remember: The plugin captures individual posts, but not the homepage, so I submitted the root domain to the Wayback Machine separately; There is no way to exclude posts or pages, even if that content is excluded from other search engines or sitemaps (such as by using NOINDEX); and I need to deactivate it on my staging/development site, lest the wrong URL be submitted to the Wayback Machine!

Contributors & Developers

Changelog

1.00 March 25, 2017

• Initial release

1.01 July 29, 2017

• Added class check

1.02 July 29, 2019

• Added taxonomy support and also a column to track performance

1.03 October 10, 2020

• Hide column by default