With the vast information online today, it’s safe to say that the internet has solidified itself as an invaluable resource for information. However, the web is also highly time-sensitive.

Numerous studies have revealed that only a small fraction of content stays online for more than a year. The historical information you capture today for business or personal reasons might not be there a couple of years down the line. So, the web page you had two years ago may not be

visible or accessible to your or your audience anymore.

That’s unless, of course, you archive it.

If you don’t want to lose your website information with time but are not archiving your website or haven’t really been doing much to streamlining the process, maybe it’s time that you paid more attention to it.

Website archiving helps preserve and make available historical documents or content that are published on the internet.

So, how can you fine-tune your website archive? Here are three essential tips. You can also see more here.

1. Automate the Process

Archiving your website manually on, say, your hard drive is tiresome and, at worst, unrealistic. You will have to physically keep up with your website pages, separating the old from the new.

But you don’t have to go through all that.

A much more efficient system is automating your online archiving process. You can do that with the help of archiving software.

The software will automatically store your web pages as well as all the information on them and archive them periodically as per a set time. This will help you save a lot of time and effort from having to do the work manually.

2. Implement Dynamic Monitoring

As long as you run an active company website, you’ll always be making changes and adding more content as the business grows. After a while, you’ll find that these changes may prove hard to keep up with.

Dynamic monitoring is a way of gathering and monitoring data in real-time. It basically helps you monitor and capture the addition of new pages and even the smallest changes in already existing pages.

With dynamic monitoring, you can be sure that your site archive will always be up-to-date.

3. Follow Standard Guidelines to Make Your Website More Accessible

You can actually make your website easier to archive by following proper guidelines. Things like using standard formats, adding text/ HTML alternatives to dynamic content, sectioning your content into headings and bulleted points can all help make your website easier to capture.

Remember, the more accessible your archived website is, the more visible it will be to users as well as search engines.

A Website Archive is No Longer an Option but a Necessity

Archiving is the best way to preserve the data and content of your website. Unlike backing up your website, archiving will store your website as it is so users can actually navigate and experience your site as if it were still live.

Additionally, archiving offers many benefits such as complete data security and faster data for recording and analysis. So, if you’re worried about losing invaluable data, website archiving should be at the forefront of your digital needs.

If you don’t have an archiving system, there’s no time to waste

If you’re like many small businesses, archiving files is probably the last thing on your mind. After all, you’ve got clients to please and revenue targets to hit. Who cares if some random file you haven’t looked at in months goes missing or accidentally gets deleted?

The truth is that you never know how important information is until it’s gone. Take San Francisco-based computer programmer Stefan Thomas, who was in the news for having nearly $240 million in bitcoin locked away in a digital wallet. He got the bitcoins years ago as a reward for a cryptocurrency project when they weren’t worth that much, and he apparently misplaced the password. Now, after eight wrong guesses, he has two guesses left before the hard drive encrypts itself and destroys his fortune forever. Ouch!

Your company is constantly producing data, even when you don’t realize it. Someday you may need to refer back to it, perhaps for tax purposes, or maybe there’s some data from a past email marketing campaign that could give you a competitive advantage.

Either way, your data is much more valuable than you realize, so you must store it and protect it. Every day you delay, you put your company at risk, so implement an archiving system sooner rather than later.