UK Web Archive Alternatives for Old British Websites

The UK Web Archive is partly back. The British Library's UK Web Archive page now says the platform has been restored after the 2023 disruption. The catch is in the detail. You can search from anywhere, but only by typing a full URL. The searchable collection stops at December 2022. Most archived sites can only be viewed inside a Legal Deposit Library reading room, and the library asks you to check that the service is running before you travel. As late as 29 January 2026, the curators wrote that the site "remains offline" and hoped to bring it back towards the middle of 2026.

The outage came from a ransomware attack by the Rhysida group. The library logged it at 9:54 a.m. on 28 October 2023, and Wikipedia's account records a demand of 20 bitcoin, then about £596,000. The library did not pay, about 600GB of stolen data was leaked, and recovery was estimated at £6 to 7 million. Crawling never stopped. New captures were made on Amazon Web Services the whole time, but they are not in the public search yet.

In January 2024 the library's own lead curator pointed readers to other archives while the service was down. Three UK public archives from that list appear below. One more, Memento Time Travel, was switched off in September 2025. The rest of the picks cover keyword search across a national archive and saving pages yourself. For broader options, see our guides to Wayback Machine alternatives and Internet Archive alternatives.

Prices below are as of November 6, 2026. Our method is on How we review tools.

Quick comparison

UK Government Web Archive

The National Archives runs this one, not the British Library, and the library itself sent readers here during the outage. Capture began in August 2003, and the Internet Archive supplied older copies back to 1996, per Wikipedia. The about page counts over 6,000 websites, adds around 100 snapshots a month, and says anyone can open them online.

Full-text search sits next to an A-Z list on the home page. A 2017 relaunch moved search to the cloud and ran OCR on PDFs, so scanned reports turn up by their words, the archive's blog explains. A separate social media archive holds government Twitter, YouTube and Flickr channels, some from 2014, and gained keyword search in late 2019.

Best for: Finding pages from closed departments, retired agencies and public inquiry sites.

Pricing:

• Free, open to anyone online

Watch out for:

• Crown Copyright rules mean the social media archive keeps only the government's side of a conversation with the public.
• Websites and social media are searched in two places. A single search across both was still an aim, not a feature, in the social media archive post.

Official site: UK Government Web Archive.

Wayback Machine

Much of the UK Web Archive's older .uk material started life here. The British Library holds a set of .uk sites the Internet Archive crawled up to March 2013. The Wayback Machine still serves its own copies of those pages, plus everything captured since, to anyone online. It passed one trillion saved pages in October 2025.

Save Page Now stores a single page, images and CSS included, when you ask, so you can capture a UK page today instead of waiting for a legal deposit crawl. The browser extension for Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari shows a URL's snapshot count and offers an archived copy when a page returns a 4xx or 5xx error.

Best for: Ordinary .uk business, charity, club and personal sites that the British Library can only show in a reading room.

Pricing:

• Free to browse
• Save Page Now needs a free login

Watch out for:

• Reddit cut its access back to the Reddit homepage on August 11, 2025, so newer threads are missing.
• Save Page Now does not follow outlinks or crawl a whole site, per the help page.

Official site: Wayback Machine. Our listing: Wayback Machine.

UK Parliament Web Archive

Parliamentary Archives chooses what goes into this record of Parliament on the web, which runs from 2009 to the present. Beyond the websites, it keeps tweets from accounts tied to parliamentary bodies, videos Parliament released on YouTube, and its Flickr photographs.

There are four ways in: a search box, an A-Z list of archived sites, a curated record of Parliament websites, and a separate search over the whole social media set. The host name points to MirrorWeb, the same contractor behind the government archive, which agreed to combine with Red Oak in July 2026.

Best for: Old Parliament web pages, plus posts and videos from official parliamentary accounts.

Pricing:

• Free public access; the archive home page lists no charge or login

Watch out for:

• Nothing before 2009 is here. Earlier Parliament pages have to come from the Wayback Machine or the government archive.

Official site: UK Parliament Web Archive.

National Records of Scotland Web Archive

Scotland's record keeper treats websites as part of the public record. Its archive page says National Records of Scotland has a statutory duty to collect them, preserve them and keep them publicly accessible for good. Sites are picked through its Web Continuity Service, and the British Library describes the collection as websites about Scotland's people and history.

You can search or browse an A-Z list, and captures replay in the browser. Some cookies are needed for playback, and the site warns that archived pages may leave their own cookies behind, so a private window keeps things tidy.

Best for: Pages from Scottish public bodies that the UK-wide archive may hold only in a reading room.

Pricing:

• Free; public access is a statutory duty

Watch out for:

• The home page gives no start date, site count or word on full-text search, so check the A-Z list before assuming a site is in.

Official site: National Records of Scotland Web Archive.

Australian Web Archive

Researchers who miss keyword search over a national archive should look at Australia. The National Library's archive opened to the public through Trove in March 2019 with about 600 TB and 9 billion records, and it can be searched by URL, keyword or theme. Its PANDORA collection dates from October 1996.

Advanced search filters by timespan, domain and file type, and one tick limits results to gov.au. The Australian domain harvest makes up more than 80% of the archive, the library's page says, and legal deposit was extended to digital publications in 2016. Snapshots open online, with no reading room visit.

Best for: Researchers who want to search a whole national web archive by keyword, from home.

Pricing:

• Free through Trove

Watch out for:

• Many sites are captured only about once a year, and most social media is not archived.
• PDFs and videos are not always captured, so documents linked from a page may be missing.

Official site: Australian Web Archive.

Perma.cc

Footnotes that pointed at the UK Web Archive broke along with it. Perma.cc solves that job differently: it makes a fixed copy of a page you cite and gives you a short link to it. The home page says it is built and supported by libraries and serves scholars, journals and courts.

Students and staff get it free through a registrar library at their institution, and courts use it free too. Anyone else can open an account and buy links, monthly or in one-off packs that never expire.

Best for: Academics, journalists and lawyers who need a citation link that will still work in ten years.

Pricing:

• Free for academic use through an affiliated library, and for courts
• Individuals: $10/month for 10 links, $25/month for 100, $100/month for 500
• One-time packs: $15 for 10 links, $30 for 100, $125 for 500

Watch out for:

• Unused monthly links do not roll over, per the accounts page.
• Law firms, publishers and news organisations need a paid usage plan with no public price, so contact sales.

Official site: Perma.cc. Our listing: Perma.cc.

Browsertrix

The British Library's own web team trialled Browsertrix for complex, dynamic pages while its archive was dark, the January 2026 post says. It crawls with a real browser, can use saved browser profiles for logged-in pages, includes a QA check, and writes WACZ files that replay in ReplayWeb.page.

Webrecorder sells it as a hosted service, but the code is AGPLv3 and can run on your own Kubernetes cluster. That suits a UK council, school or company that wants its own copy of its sites rather than hoping a national crawl caught them.

Best for: Teams that need to crawl and keep their own copies of whole sites now.

Pricing:

• Starter: $30/month after a 7-day free trial; 180 execution minutes, 100 GB, 2,000 pages per crawl
• Standard: $60/month; 360 minutes, 220 GB, 5,000 pages
• Plus: $120/month; 720 minutes, 500 GB, 10,000 pages
• Pro and Enterprise: billed yearly, quote only

Watch out for:

• Crawl time is metered. Starter allows one crawl at a time and 180 minutes a month, with extra minutes bought on top.
• Existing WARC files cannot be uploaded directly, so older captures from other tools need converting first.

Official site: Browsertrix.

ArchiveWeb.page

Webrecorder's free tool records a page while you click through it. You start a session in the extension, browse, and stop, as the usage guide shows. Version 0.16.2 shipped on 30 April 2026 with desktop builds for Windows, macOS and Linux next to the Chrome extension.

Captures export as WARC or WACZ, and WACZ files open in ReplayWeb.page. The copy sits on your own disk, so reading it later does not depend on any library's servers staying up. The code is AGPL-3.0 on GitHub.

Best for: Saving a few pages exactly as they looked, including ones behind a login.

Pricing:

• Free and open source, AGPL-3.0

Watch out for:

• It needs Chrome or another Chromium browser, and the project points to Browsertrix for crawling whole sites.

Official site: ArchiveWeb.page.

How to choose

When to stay with UK Web Archive

Keep the UK Web Archive when you need its legal deposit material. It crawls .uk and other UK domains every year, and the whole archive is open to registered readers on library premises, which no other archive can match for small UK sites. If a reading room is close, ask the library first that the service is running, as the British Library advises. For anything after December 2022, start with the Wayback Machine until the newer captures are released.

Frequently asked questions