Web Archivability

Web builders already design for accessibility, performance, search engine optimization, standards compliance, and usability. An emerging best practice is to design also for archivability. Archivability refers to the ease with which the content, structure, functionality, and front-end presentation(s) of a website can be preserved and later re-presented, using contemporary web archiving tools.

Many organizations are now engaged in preserving many different types of content from the web. The cohort of users of the temporal web can only grow with time, underscoring the breadth of its stakeholders and the outsized impact of investments to improve the usability of archived resources. As a web builder, you can help facilitate web archiving efforts by third parties or your own organization by following the archivability recommendations presented in the sub-pages linked below.

In addition to improving the usability of the temporal web and helping to ensure the preservation of collective cultural heritage, designing for archivability will also tend to optimize your website for access by other crawlers, boost website performance, enhance usability for contemporary users, and improve the likelihood that you'll be able to refer to and/or recover historical versions of your own web content.