95%+
Pages recovered from the archive
5 days
From deleted site to relaunch
$50K/mo
Ad spend protected from dead pages
15+
People working across the rebuild
About the Client
The client manufactures and installs hurricane-impact windows and doors across Florida, with nine showroom locations and a long track record in coastal home improvement.
Its website had around 2,800 pages covering product lines, window and door styles, and service areas. Those pages were also the landing points for a large Google Ads program, so keeping the site online was directly tied to lead generation and sales.
The Challenge
The site had been maintained by an outside vendor and had picked up malware. The hosting provider had sent warnings about the site’s condition, but those warnings went unanswered.
The host eventually took the site offline. Once its retention window expired, the stored backup was purged too.
The only backup that remained was more than two years old. It was missing years of product, location, and other content, so restoring it would have brought back a version of the business that no longer matched its advertising, inventory, or current market.
By then, sales had already dropped. Around $50,000 a month in Google Ads was still running and sending paid traffic to dead URLs. Organic rankings were also starting to decline.
There was no current website to work from. We also had no access to the original hosting or domain.
Our Approach
There was nothing current to restore, so we reconstructed the site from the copies that still existed publicly.
The Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive held snapshots of the live site. Google cache provided additional copies where the archive was incomplete.
From there, the recovery became a page-by-page reconstruction:
-
Rebuilt the URL structure
We crawled the archived site with Screaming Frog and used the archived sitemaps to map the site's original URL structure. -
Created a master recovery list
Every archived URL and asset went into a single spreadsheet. This gave the team one source of truth and prevented pages from being missed or rebuilt twice. -
Split the work across 15+ people
Developers, designers, project managers, and account managers each took ownership of a defined block of pages. They pulled the content from the archive and rebuilt it on fresh managed WordPress hosting. -
Restored revenue-critical pages first
Paid-traffic landing pages and the highest-value organic pages were rebuilt before the rest of the site. The goal was to stop paying for clicks that ended on dead pages while the wider rebuild continued. -
Recovered more than 95% of the site
Most pages could be recovered directly from archived snapshots. Where those snapshots were incomplete, the remaining pages were rebuilt manually.
The work was completed without access to the original hosting or domain. At the client’s request, we also kept the recovery separate from the vendor relationship they were still resolving.
The recovery ran on three things: the public archive, a master spreadsheet, and a team working in parallel.
The Outcome and Value
The full site was live again in 5 days.
Because the paid landing pages were restored first, the $50,000-a-month Google Ads campaigns stopped sending traffic exclusively to dead pages while the rest of the site was still being rebuilt.
The restored URLs and content also matched what had previously been indexed, helping the site’s organic rankings hold through the cutover rather than forcing the business to rebuild its search presence from scratch.
The result was a current website reconstructed from an archive instead of an outdated backup:
Metric
Before
After
Site status
Deleted, no usable backup
Live again, ~2,800 pages, in 5 days
Best available copy
Backup 2+ years out of date
Current site rebuilt from the archive
Paid ad spend
~$50K/mo going to dead pages
Live landing pages restored
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 Provided
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