A Practical Guide to Getting Website Archiving Right
Implementing a website archiving programme is not simply a matter of selecting a provider and pressing “start.” A well-designed programme requires thoughtful planning across multiple dimensions: scope, frequency, format, integrity, retention, testing, sovereignty, and documentation. Each dimension has implications for compliance, legal defensibility, and long-term value.
This checklist is designed for compliance officers, legal teams, records managers, and IT leaders who are building or improving their organisation’s website archiving practices. It is deliberately practical – each item represents a concrete decision or action, not an abstract principle.
Step 1: Define Your Archiving Scope
Before configuring any technology, you must determine exactly what needs to be archived. This is a business decision, not a technical one.
Checklist:
Identify all websites your organisation operates. This includes the primary corporate website, product microsites, regional and language variants, investor relations pages, career portals, customer-facing portals, and any temporary campaign sites. Most organisations have more web properties than they realise.
Determine which pages within each site require archiving. You may need to archive every page, or you may need to archive only specific sections – regulatory disclosures, product information, pricing pages, terms of service, privacy policies, marketing claims, and leadership bios. Your compliance and legal teams should drive this decision.
Identify third-party websites that reference your organisation. In some cases, you may need to archive competitor websites, partner sites, or review platforms that contain content relevant to your business. Discuss these requirements with your archiving provider.
Document authentication requirements. If any of your websites contain content behind login walls – customer portals, authenticated product pages, partner extranets – your archiving solution must support authenticated capture. Identify these requirements upfront.
Map regulatory requirements to web properties. Different websites may be subject to different regulations. Your investor relations site may fall under SEC requirements. Your European product site may fall under GDPR and EU consumer protection rules. Your pharmaceutical product pages may fall under FDA labelling regulations. Map each web property to the regulations that govern it.
Step 2: Choose the Right Capture Frequency
The appropriate capture frequency depends on how often your website content changes and how granular your compliance requirements are.
Checklist:
Daily captures for websites with frequent content changes – news sites, e-commerce platforms with dynamic pricing, financial services sites with regularly updated disclosures.
Weekly captures for websites with moderate change frequency – corporate marketing sites with periodic updates, product information pages that change with release cycles.
Monthly captures for relatively stable websites – institutional pages, policy documents, organisational information that changes infrequently.
Event-driven captures triggered by specific business events – product launches, pricing changes, regulatory disclosures, terms of service updates, website redesigns. Your archiving provider should support on-demand capture requests.
Pre- and post-change captures to create a before-and-after record around significant website updates. This is particularly important for regulated content where you need to demonstrate what changed and when.
Document your frequency rationale. Record why each frequency was chosen. This documentation demonstrates to auditors and regulators that your capture schedule was deliberately designed to meet your compliance obligations, not arbitrarily selected.
Step 3: Ensure ISO 28500 WARC Format
The file format used to store your web archives determines their long-term accessibility, interoperability, and legal defensibility.
Checklist:
Verify that your provider stores archives in ISO 28500-compliant WARC files. The Web ARChive format is the international standard for web archiving, designed specifically for preserving the complete HTTP transaction of every captured resource.
Reject proprietary formats. If a provider stores archives in a proprietary format, your data is locked into that vendor. Migration to a different provider may be difficult, expensive, or impossible. WARC is an open standard supported by the global digital preservation community.
Confirm that WARC files include complete metadata. A compliant WARC file should contain HTTP request headers, response headers, response bodies, timestamps, and resource-level metadata for every captured object. Ask your provider to demonstrate the contents of a sample WARC file.
Verify WARC file validation. Your provider should routinely validate WARC files against the ISO 28500 specification to ensure ongoing compliance. Ask how validation is performed and how often.
Step 4: Verify Cryptographic Integrity
Cryptographic verification is the foundation of legal defensibility. Without it, there is no independently verifiable proof that an archive has not been modified since capture.
Checklist:
Confirm that cryptographic hash signatures are applied to every capture. Not just some captures, not just on request – every single capture should be signed.
Identify which hashing algorithms are used. SHA-512 is the current gold standard for hash strength. Dual-algorithm signing – such as SHA-512 combined with RIPEMD-160 – provides additional assurance through algorithmic independence.
Verify that signatures are applied at the moment of capture. Signatures applied after the fact – hours or days after capture – create a window during which the archive could theoretically have been modified. Signatures must be generated as part of the capture process itself.
Confirm that signature verification is available to you. You should be able to independently verify the integrity of your archives at any time using the stored hash values. Ask for the verification procedure and test it.
Request a sample integrity report. Your provider should be able to produce a report showing the hash values for any archive, along with confirmation that the current content matches the original signatures.
Step 5: Establish Retention Policies
How long you keep your web archives must be aligned with your regulatory, legal, and business requirements.
Checklist:
Map retention periods to regulatory requirements. SEC Rule 17a-4 requires certain records to be kept for at least six years. FINRA Rule 4511 requires four years for general business records. GDPR requires data to be kept only as long as necessary for its purpose. FDA regulations may require records for the lifetime of a product plus additional years. Identify the longest applicable requirement for each web property.
Establish a litigation hold procedure for web archives. When litigation is anticipated or underway, normal retention policies are suspended. Your archiving system must support litigation holds that prevent the deletion or modification of relevant archives. Document the procedure for initiating and releasing holds.
Define disposition procedures. When archives reach the end of their retention period, how are they disposed of? Secure deletion from WORM storage requires specific procedures. Document the process and maintain disposition records.
Account for overlapping requirements. A single web archive may be subject to multiple retention requirements. The archive should be retained for the longest applicable period.
Review retention policies annually. Regulations change. New requirements emerge. Industry guidance evolves. Review and update your retention policies at least annually to ensure they remain current.
Step 6: Test Archive Replay
An archive you cannot access and review is an archive you cannot use. Regular testing of archive replay is essential.
Checklist:
Verify that archived sites can be browsed interactively. Open archived captures in a standard web browser. Navigate between pages. Scroll through content. Click on links. The archived experience should closely match the original.
Check visual fidelity. Compare the archived version to the live site (or to screenshots taken at the time of capture). Look for missing images, broken layouts, absent styling, and incomplete content rendering.
Test dynamic content preservation. If the original website contained JavaScript-rendered content, verify that this content is present in the archive. Check for dynamic elements, interactive features, and content that required scrolling or interaction to appear.
Verify multimedia preservation. Confirm that embedded images, videos, and other media are captured and playable within the archive.
Test search and retrieval. Verify that you can locate a specific page from a specific date quickly. Time the retrieval process. In a legal or regulatory scenario, you may need to produce archived content on short notice.
Conduct replay testing on a regular schedule. Do not wait until you need an archive to discover it is incomplete. Test quarterly, at minimum.
Step 7: Plan for Data Sovereignty
The physical location of your web archives has legal, regulatory, and security implications.
Checklist:
Confirm the physical location of your archive storage. Know the specific data centre locations, not just the cloud provider brand.
Verify that no data leaves the designated jurisdiction. Ask whether processing, backup, disaster recovery, or maintenance activities cause data to be transferred outside your chosen jurisdiction, even temporarily.
Assess the legal framework governing access to your data. Different jurisdictions provide different levels of protection against government access, court orders, and law enforcement requests. Understand the legal framework where your data resides.
Consider Swiss jurisdiction for maximum data protection. Switzerland offers one of the world’s strongest data protection frameworks, political neutrality, and legal stability. For organisations prioritising data sovereignty, Swiss-based storage provides distinct advantages.
Document your data sovereignty decisions. Record where your archives are stored, why that jurisdiction was chosen, and what protections it provides. This documentation supports audit readiness and demonstrates due diligence.
Step 8: Document Your Process for Audit Readiness
When an auditor, regulator, or opposing counsel asks about your web archiving practices, you need to be able to produce comprehensive documentation – not reconstruct it from memory.
Checklist:
Create a formal web archiving policy. This document should define the scope, frequency, format, integrity measures, retention periods, roles, and responsibilities of your archiving programme. It should be reviewed and approved by compliance, legal, and IT leadership.
Maintain capture logs. Automated logs documenting every capture – timestamps, URLs, resource counts, error reports, and completion status – provide evidence that your archiving programme operates as designed.
Document your chain of custody procedures. How are archives stored? Who has access? How is access logged? How are archives retrieved when needed? All of these questions should have documented answers.
Record your provider’s credentials and certifications. Your provider’s ISO certifications, storage standards, cryptographic methods, and operational procedures are part of your compliance story. Keep this documentation current.
Conduct periodic internal audits. Review your web archiving programme against its documented policy at least annually. Identify gaps, document remediation actions, and maintain audit records.
Prepare a summary for external audiences. Create a concise overview of your web archiving programme suitable for presentation to regulators, auditors, and legal counsel. This should cover what you archive, how you archive it, where it is stored, how integrity is maintained, and how long it is retained.
Putting It All Together
A comprehensive website archiving programme does not need to be complex, but it does need to be deliberate. Each step in this checklist represents a concrete decision that contributes to the overall quality, defensibility, and value of your web archives.
The investment is modest. The protection is substantial. And the alternative – discovering during a regulatory examination or court proceeding that your website content was never properly preserved – is a risk no organisation should accept.
At Aleph Archives, we have been helping organisations implement best-in-class website archiving programmes since 2010. Every archive we produce meets the highest standards: ISO 28500 WARC format, SHA-512 and RIPEMD-160 cryptographic verification, WORM storage, interactive replay, and comprehensive chain-of-custody documentation. Our clients – including Fortune 500 companies like Bombardier, Procter & Gamble, NBC, State Farm, Santander, Toyota, and Reuters – trust us to preserve their web presence with the rigour and precision that compliance demands.
If your organisation is ready to implement or improve its website archiving practices, this checklist is a strong starting point. And we are here to help you execute every step of it.
