An internal test run of our paid restore on facupscene.com, a domain we do not own. It was not a client job. Part of the website recovery hub.
When it came up in our expired-domain research on 24 October 2026, facupscene.com was a parked domain. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine remembers something else: from 2008 to 2012 it captured an FA Cup fan site there, with match reports, FA Cup history, videos and FAQs.
If you need to recover a deleted website and the host, the files and the backups are all gone, that is where you start too: with whatever the archive saw. So on 25 October 2026 we ordered a restore of facupscene.com the way a customer would, through our public order system with an internal order code, on the Starter tier. It went through the same paid restore as every order: the AI reads the archive and picks the snapshots worth trusting, drops junk and parked pages, keeps the original URLs and builds the redirects, brings the original look back, and checks the result against the original; on a real order, a human signs it off before delivery.
The result is a restored WordPress site on a private preview, marked noindex so search engines are asked to keep it out of their results. It is not published anywhere, and we are not linking to it. The writing on it belongs to whoever ran the fan site, not to us, so this page shows the numbers from the run and none of the old site’s content: no screenshots, no excerpts. Our first case study was on a domain we registered ourselves, so it could show pictures. This one cannot. Every number below comes from the run’s own records; none is estimated.
What the archive held
Captures of the domain per year: 48 in 2008, 227 in 2009, 371 in 2010, 65 in 2011, 4 in 2012, and a single one in 2023.
We restored the site as it was in 2009 and 2010, its busiest years and the two that hold the bulk of the captures. The snapshots used run from 22 January 2009 to 22 December 2010. Choosing a period matters because an archived site is not one copy. This one is hundreds of captures taken on different days, and a 2009 page under a 2011 menu is a site that never existed.
Our free Wayback scan of the domain counted 173 recoverable URLs. The scan is a quick preview, not a full count. The archive holds 354 distinct URLs for the domain, and the restore gave every one of them an outcome.
Old addresses, kept working
The old site ran on a 2009 WordPress theme with two habits. Article addresses ended in .html. Section listings sat at the root of the domain, at addresses like /soccer-news/. Any link to the old site, wherever it sits on the web, points at those exact addresses.
The restore kept the first habit and redirected the second. Of the restored pages, 123 are old .html article URLs, served at the same address. The restored site has five WordPress categories, among them soccer news, FA Cup news, FA Cup videos and the FA Cup FAQ, and old section paths such as /soccer-news/ now point to /category/soccer-news/. In all, 36 old paths answer with a permanent (301) redirect to their new place, for example /football/fa-cup-videos/ → /category/fa-cup-videos/.
A kept address keeps every link that points at it. A lost one turns each of those links into an error page.
What came back, and what did not
Each of the 354 archived URLs ended up in one of three places.
| Outcome | URLs | What they are |
|---|---|---|
| Restored as pages of the new site | 152 | 111 posts, 14 pages, the home page, and the category and archive listings |
| Redirected (301) | 9 | 8 to the home page, 1 to the sitemap |
| Left out | 193 | Tag listing pages, all of them |
The 193 left out are lists of links to posts, with no writing of their own. Restoring them would have added 193 thin pages to the new site and not one sentence anybody wrote. That is the right call on a site like this, and an owner would still see every one of them on the URL list, so the call can be argued with.
Images: 29 came back. Another 109 images that the old pages referred to were never saved by the archive, so there was nothing to bring back. 64 of them were product pictures hot-linked from Amazon’s image server, 10 were eBay thumbnails, 33 were the site’s own files, and 2 had no identifiable host. They are listed for the owner. If your own archived pages show the same holes, here is why Wayback Machine pages lose their images.
Authors: the archive held no author names, so the restored posts carry none. We did not invent any. An invented byline is a small lie repeated on every post.
How the result was checked
Every final check on this run passed:
- All 125 post and page URLs answer with a normal page (HTTP 200).
- A sample of 25 of the 36 redirects answers with a 301 to the right place.
- Nothing on the site still links to, or loads a file from, web.archive.org.
- No broken images.
- The original design elements are present on the home page, a post and a category page.
- No JavaScript errors.
- Nothing scrolls sideways on a phone.
We also scored how closely three restored pages look like their archived originals, on a scale where 1.0 means identical: 0.98 for the home page, 0.959 for a post, 0.964 for a category page. Read that as close, not identical. The restore brings the original look back; it is not a pixel copy, and a score does not replace a person looking at both pages side by side. That is what the human review before delivery is for.
About 35 minutes, quoted at three days
The run took about 35 minutes, from the order to a checked preview. Starter delivery is still quoted at three days, because a human reviews every job before it reaches the owner. The machine part is quick. The part where a person checks the machine is not, and we would rather quote the honest number than the impressive one.
What an owner would receive
On a real order, a Wayback Machine to WordPress restore like this one hands the owner:
- a WordPress import file with the posts and pages;
- the theme that brings the original look back;
- redirect rules for nginx and Apache, plus the same redirects as a CSV;
- a sitemap;
- the list of URLs and what happened to each one;
- the list of images the archive never saved.
An owner who orders a restore confirms they have the right to the content. We have no such right to this site’s writing, which is why it stays on a private preview.
What this does not show
- It is not a client job, and we do not own the domain. Nobody got a site back at the end of it.
- Nothing went live. The restore sits on a private, noindex preview, so it says nothing about traffic or rankings, and we make no claim about either. A restored site is a starting point, not a result.
- It is not a first attempt. It was the fifth end-to-end run that day; the first four went into finishing the order pipeline, and the numbers here are from the fifth.
- It is one site. Another site will have different gaps: a thinner archive, other images missing, other habits in its addresses.
Wayback Press is not affiliated with the Internet Archive. The archive is public, and we read it the way anyone can.
If a site of yours went the same way, run the free scan to see what the archive kept, then check the pricing page for what each tier adds.
facupscene.com is still a parked domain. Its 2010 self is back in private, minus the Amazon pictures.