15 Years of Web Archiving: Lessons from 2010 to 2025
In 2010, the web was a simpler place. Websites were built with HTML, CSS, and a bit of jQuery. Content management systems like WordPress and Drupal generated complete HTML pages on the server, and what you saw in the browser was more or less what existed in the source code. Archiving a website was straightforward: download the HTML, save the stylesheets and images, store everything in a structured format. Done.
Fifteen years later, everything has changed. The websites we archive today are full applications — powered by React, Angular, and Vue, rendered client-side by JavaScript, personalised by algorithms, gated by cookie consent dialogs, and protected by sophisticated anti-bot systems. A modern enterprise website might make hundreds of API calls just to render a single page. The HTML source often contains nothing more than a <div id="app"></div> and a script tag. The actual content exists only in the moment, assembled dynamically in the visitor’s browser.
This is the story of what we have learned in fifteen years of solving the hardest problem in digital preservation — and why we believe the companies that stayed focused on this problem will be the ones still standing fifteen years from now.
2010-2013: The Early Days
When Aleph Archives was founded in Lausanne, Switzerland in 2010, web archiving was still a niche discipline. The Internet Archive had been crawling the web since 1996, but enterprise web archiving — the kind that produces legally defensible, compliance-ready records — was in its infancy. A small number of companies saw the opportunity. Pagefreezer was founded the same year, in 2010, by Michael Riedijk in Vancouver. Two years later, in 2012, three technologists in Manchester, England launched MirrorWeb. The market was emerging, and we were all trying to solve the same fundamental problem: how to faithfully capture and preserve the living web.
The dominant technology of that era was server-side HTML. PHP, ASP.NET, and Ruby on Rails generated complete HTML pages that were relatively easy to capture. A web crawler could request a URL, receive a fully rendered page, and store it. The main challenges were scale — crawling speed, storage costs, deduplication — and completeness. Missing CSS files, broken image references, and inconsistent rendering across browsers were the daily headaches of early web archivists.
Standards were emerging alongside the technology. ISO 28500, which defined the WARC (Web ARChive) file format, was first published in 2009. This gave the industry a common language for storing web archives. It was one of the most consequential developments in the field, though few appreciated it at the time.
Lesson 1 — Standards matter. We adopted WARC from day one. It was a deliberate choice that shaped everything we built. Companies that stored archives in proprietary formats — optimising for speed or convenience in the short term — faced painful and expensive migrations later. When your clients depend on archives that must remain accessible for decades, the format you choose on day one matters enormously.
2014-2017: The JavaScript Revolution
The rise of modern JavaScript frameworks changed everything about web archiving — and not gradually. It happened with startling speed.
Angular emerged in 2012. React followed in 2013. Vue arrived in 2014. Within a few years, the way enterprise websites were built had fundamentally shifted. Instead of servers delivering complete HTML pages, websites became client-side applications. The server sent a minimal HTML shell and a bundle of JavaScript code. The browser executed the code, fetched data from APIs, and assembled the page in real time.
For web archiving, this was an inflection point. Traditional crawlers that only downloaded HTML now received empty pages. The content they were supposed to capture simply did not exist in the response. A web archive of a React application captured with a traditional crawler was like photographing an empty stage — the set, the actors, the performance were all missing.
This was the moment when web archiving became orders of magnitude harder. Archiving technology needed to evolve from simple HTTP downloaders into something that could execute JavaScript, wait for asynchronous content to load, handle client-side routing, and capture the fully rendered state of an application. It required, in essence, running a real browser at scale — with all the complexity, unpredictability, and resource demands that implies.
Some companies in our space began exploring easier revenue streams around this time. It was an understandable response. The technical challenges of JavaScript-era web archiving required massive investment in engineering, and the return on that investment was uncertain. Simpler forms of archiving — capturing social media feeds via APIs, for instance — offered faster growth with less technical risk.
Lesson 2 — The web does not wait for you. If your technology cannot keep up with how websites are built, your archives become incomplete. And incomplete archives are worse than no archives at all. An organisation that believes it has a compliant archive, but actually has a collection of empty HTML shells, is in a more dangerous position than one that knows it has no archive. False confidence is the enemy of compliance.
2018-2020: The Compliance Wave
The General Data Protection Regulation came into effect in May 2018, and the compliance landscape was transformed overnight. GDPR created massive demand for data management and compliance tools across every industry. Organisations that had never thought about digital recordkeeping were suddenly scrambling to understand their obligations.
For the web archiving industry, this was a double-edged moment. On one hand, demand for proper website archiving increased as organisations recognised that their digital presence was subject to regulatory scrutiny. On the other hand, the broader compliance market — Slack archiving, Microsoft Teams archiving, email retention, Bloomberg message capture — was growing much faster. For companies with investors and quarterly growth targets, the pull towards these adjacent markets was irresistible.
This was the period when several companies in our space began their diversification. Pagefreezer expanded into social media archiving, Microsoft Teams archiving, and text message archiving. MirrorWeb added email and communication archiving, social media archiving, and mobile archiving to its platform. These were rational business decisions — the compliance market for enterprise communications was enormous and growing, and the technical challenges were more tractable than web archiving. Capturing messages from a well-documented API is fundamentally different from rendering a complex JavaScript application in a headless browser.
Then COVID-19 arrived in early 2020 and accelerated everything. Remote work became the norm overnight. Enterprise communications moved to Slack, Teams, and Zoom. The demand for communications archiving exploded, and companies that had positioned themselves in that market benefited enormously.
We watched this unfold from Lausanne. We understood the commercial logic. We also understood something else: every hour our competitors spent building Slack connectors and Teams integrations was an hour they were not spending on the core challenge of web archiving. And the web was not getting simpler while they looked away.
Lesson 3 — Stay focused when others scatter. The temptation to diversify is strongest when adjacent markets are booming. But focus compounds over time. Every year of sustained investment in a single hard problem creates advantages that diversified competitors cannot replicate. We chose to stay focused. It was not always a comfortable choice, but it was the right one.
2021-2023: The Complexity Explosion
If the JavaScript revolution made web archiving harder, the period from 2021 to 2023 made it harder still. Single-page applications became the default architecture for enterprise websites. But the challenges went far beyond JavaScript rendering.
Cookie consent dialogs became ubiquitous, and they were not merely cosmetic overlays. Modern consent management platforms dynamically load or withhold content based on consent state. An archive captured without properly handling consent flows might contain a completely different version of the site than what a real user would see.
CAPTCHA walls and anti-bot systems grew increasingly sophisticated. Cloudflare, Akamai, and other CDN providers deployed machine learning-based bot detection that could distinguish between a human visitor and an automated crawler with remarkable accuracy. Web archiving systems needed to navigate these defences without triggering blocks — a constantly evolving arms race.
Web performance optimisation introduced another layer of complexity. Lazy loading meant that images and content below the fold did not exist until the user scrolled. Code splitting meant that JavaScript bundles were loaded on demand. Service workers cached and served content independently of the network. Intersection observers triggered content loads based on viewport position. Each of these techniques, designed to make websites faster for humans, made them harder to archive completely.
Meanwhile, in an ironic twist, the social media platforms that competitors had built their diversification strategies around began restricting API access. Twitter’s API changes in 2023 were particularly disruptive, but the trend was broader. The “easy” archiving that had lured companies away from web archiving was becoming less easy.
Lesson 4 — Hard problems reward perseverance. Every year the web gets more complex, and every year our technology gets better at handling that complexity. This is not a coincidence. Sustained investment creates compounding advantages. A team that has spent a decade solving browser rendering challenges, anti-bot navigation, and dynamic content capture has institutional knowledge that cannot be acquired quickly. Perseverance is a competitive moat.
2024-2025: AI and the New Frontier
The arrival of generative AI has introduced yet another dimension to the web archiving challenge. AI-generated content is now embedded throughout enterprise websites — from chatbots and personalised recommendations to dynamically generated product descriptions and automated content variations. Websites adapt in real time to user behaviour, context, and history. The same URL can show materially different content to different visitors, at different times, on different devices.
Some of our competitors have embraced the AI narrative enthusiastically. Hanzo, which began as a web archiving company, has repositioned itself entirely around AI-powered eDiscovery and data intelligence, with products like Spotlight AI and marketing language about being “data navigators.” The word “archiving” has all but disappeared from their vocabulary, replaced by “AI signals” and “generative AI-powered capabilities.”
We take a different view. AI is a powerful tool, and we use machine learning in our own systems — for intelligent crawl scheduling, content change detection, and quality assurance. But we are clear-eyed about what AI is and what it is not. AI does not change the fundamental challenge of web archiving. The core problem — faithfully capturing and preserving the live web so that it can be replayed exactly as it appeared — remains exactly what it was in 2010. The technology required to solve it has evolved dramatically, but the mission is the same.
Lesson 5 — Buzzwords fade, engineering endures. Every few years, the technology industry discovers a new paradigm that is supposed to change everything. Cloud computing, blockchain, the metaverse, generative AI — each has been proclaimed as transformative. Some of them are. But the organisations that build lasting value are the ones that apply new technologies to real problems rather than rebranding themselves around the latest trend. We will continue to adopt new technologies when they make our archives better. We will not pretend that a new technology changes what we fundamentally are.
What We Have Built
After fifteen years, Aleph Archives produces web archives that can be replayed exactly as the original website appeared — every page, every image, every interactive element, every dynamic content load. Our archives are not screenshots. They are not simplified copies. They are faithful reproductions of the complete web experience, stored in a format that will remain accessible for decades.
Every archive we produce is stored in ISO 28500-compliant WARC files with cryptographic verification. Each capture includes complete metadata — timestamps, HTTP headers, content hashes, and chain-of-custody documentation. These are not technical details; they are the foundation of legal defensibility. When one of our clients needs to demonstrate in court exactly what their website showed on a specific date, our archives provide evidence that meets the highest evidentiary standards.
Our clients include Fortune 500 companies like Bombardier, Procter & Gamble, NBC, State Farm, Santander, and Toyota, as well as government agencies and regulated institutions across six industries. They span North America and Europe, and they depend on our archives for compliance, legal protection, and institutional memory. From our base in Lausanne, Switzerland, we serve organisations that cannot afford incomplete or unreliable web archives.
We did not build this by chasing trends. We built it by spending fifteen years solving the same problem, getting better at it every single year.
The Next 15 Years
The web will continue to get more complex. That is certain. Websites will become more dynamic, more personalised, and harder to archive. New technologies will emerge — some genuinely transformative, others merely fashionable — and they will create new challenges for digital preservation.
We will continue doing what we have done since 2010: focusing exclusively on web archiving and investing every resource into solving the hardest problems in digital preservation. We will not diversify into communications archiving. We will not rebrand ourselves as an AI company. We will not chase adjacent markets because they offer easier growth.
When the next technological shift arrives — and it will — we will be ready. Not because we predicted the future, but because we have spent fifteen years building the engineering discipline, the institutional knowledge, and the technological foundation to adapt to whatever the web becomes.
When our competitors have moved on to the next trend, we will still be here, doing what we have always done: archiving the web.
A Note of Gratitude
Fifteen years is a long time in technology. Most companies pivot, diversify, or disappear. The average lifespan of an S&P 500 company has shrunk from 33 years in 1964 to under 20 years today. In the fast-moving world of technology startups, survival itself is an achievement.
Aleph Archives has done none of the expected things. We have not pivoted. We have not diversified. We have not disappeared. We have stayed focused on one mission since 2010, and we intend to stay focused for the next fifteen years. This is possible only because of the clients who have trusted us with their most important digital records, the team that has committed to solving the hardest problems, and the conviction that the web needs dedicated archivists.
We are those archivists. And we are just getting started.
