95%+
Pages recovered from the archive
5 days
From dead site to relaunch
$50K/mo
Ad spend no longer wasted
15+
Specialists on the rebuild
Client snapshot
A manufacturer and installer of hurricane-impact windows and doors, with nine showroom locations across Florida and a long track record in coastal home improvement. Their website was large by design: separate pages for every product line, every window and door style, and every service area, all feeding a heavy Google Ads program. That is around 2,800 pages of location and product content, and the paid campaigns lived or died on those landing pages being up.
What went wrong
The site had been maintained by an outside vendor. It had picked up malware, and the hosting provider had been sending warnings about the site’s status. Those warnings went unanswered. The host eventually took the site offline and, once its retention window passed, purged the site and its stored backup at the same time. Nothing current was left running anywhere.
The only copy that surfaced afterward was a backup more than two years old. It was missing years of pages, products, and location content, so restoring it would have rolled the business back to a version of itself that no longer matched its ads, its inventory, or its market.
By the time the company realized how bad it was, sales had already dropped and the site was simply gone. Around $50,000 a month in Google Ads was still running, sending expensive clicks to dead pages. Organic rankings were decaying by the day. And they had no access to the hosting or the domain to work from.
How we rebuilt it
There was no clean copy to restore, so we went to the places the real site still existed: the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, plus Google’s cache. Those snapshots held the current site, the one that had actually been live before the deletion.
From there it became a logistics problem as much as a technical one:
- Crawled and mapped the old site with Screaming Frog and the archived sitemaps to reconstruct the full URL structure
- Built a master spreadsheet of every archived URL and asset, so nothing got missed or rebuilt twice
- Split that spreadsheet across a team of more than 15 people, developers, designers, project managers, and account managers, each owning a block of pages to pull from the archive and rebuild on fresh managed WordPress hosting
- Rebuilt the paid-traffic landing pages and top organic pages first, so the money stopped bleeding on day one instead of day five
- Recovered more than 95% of the site straight from the archive, then rebuilt the remaining pages by hand where the snapshots were incomplete
We did all of it without hosting or domain access to the original site, and we kept the work quiet at the client’s request, so it stayed clear of the vendor relationship they were still untangling. The whole thing ran on the archive, a spreadsheet, and a team that could move together fast.
The outcome
The full site was live again in five days. Because we brought the ad landing pages back first, the $50,000-a-month campaigns stopped funding dead clicks almost immediately. Rankings held through the switch, because the restored URLs and content matched what the archive, and Google, had already indexed.
Most teams would call a deletion with no backup unrecoverable. Reconstructing roughly 2,800 pages from the public archive in under a week is not luck. It takes a method, the right tools, and enough hands moving in parallel to beat the clock.
Metric
Before
After
Site status
Deleted, no usable backup
Live again, ~2,800 pages, in 5 days
Best available copy
A backup 2+ years out of date
Current site, rebuilt from the archive
Paid ad spend
~$50K/mo to dead pages
Protected, live landing pages
Organic rankings
Decaying daily
Held through the cutover
Tech and tools
WordPress
Wayback Machine (Internet Archive)
Google cache
Screaming Frog
Managed WordPress hosting
Cloudflare
Services used on this project
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