This is a composite case study — a realistic “what this usually looks like” based on common recovery patterns. I’m not pretending it’s one specific client story, because that would be weird. But if you’ve ever lost a site during a redesign, this will feel painfully familiar.

Scenario

  • A site was redesigned and launched with a new URL structure.
  • The old site was taken down.
  • There was no recent full backup.
  • Traffic dropped and 404s spiked.

The goal wasn’t “recreate every pixel.” The goal was: restore the most important pages and stop users (and crawlers) from hitting dead ends.

Approach

1) Inventory the URLs (don’t guess)

You need a list of what existed. Good sources:

  • Old sitemaps (best)
  • Server logs and analytics (what people actually hit)
  • Backlink exports (what other sites still reference)

In practice, you don’t need the full universe on day one. Start with a “top 50” list: pages with traffic, pages with backlinks, and anything that still appears in navigation. 

# Example inventory (made-up URLs)
/pricing/
/docs/getting-started/
/blog/how-to-choose-a-widget/
/downloads/widget-spec-sheet.pdf

2) Find the best Wayback snapshots

Next, map each dead URL to an archived snapshot. Manually, you can do this one-by-one. For a pile of URLs, use TinyUtils Wayback Fixer to bulk map URLs to snapshots and export the results.

Snapshot picking is where people waste time. A simple rule that works: pick the newest capture that still looks “complete” (has the content, not just a shell page). If the newest capture is broken, go back a few months. 

# Example output mapping (also made-up)
/pricing/  →  https://web.archive.org/web/20240115*/example.com/pricing/
/docs/getting-started/  →  https://web.archive.org/web/20231002*/example.com/docs/getting-started/

3) Restore content and assets

Getting HTML back is the easy part. The harder part is assets: images, PDFs, CSS, embedded scripts. Prioritize what matters:

  • Landing pages and conversion pages
  • High-traffic blog posts
  • Pages with backlinks
  • Downloads and critical resources

One annoying gotcha: you might recover the page HTML, but the images are missing because they were hosted on a different domain, or they were blocked by robots.txt at the time. That’s not you doing it wrong — it’s just how archiving works.

3.5) Fix internal links (Wayback URLs are not the goal)

Wayback recovery often leaves you with links that point back into the archive or to old absolute URLs. That’s fine for the first “get something live” pass, but you’ll want to clean it up quickly:

  • Convert Wayback links back to real site URLs (otherwise users bounce into the archive mid‑journey).
  • Rehost critical images and update src paths so they’re not dependent on the archive.
  • Check downloads (PDFs, ZIPs). These are often the first things to disappear in migrations.

This is also where you decide what “good enough” means. You don’t need every old tracking pixel and widget script back. You need the content, the key images, and a page that isn’t broken.

4) Build a redirect plan (or your recovery won’t stick)

Restoring pages is great. But if old URLs still 404, users and search engines don’t magically find the new location.

A simple redirect strategy:

  • 301 redirect old → restored where there’s a clear match.
  • 410 true removals (content you intentionally don’t want back).
  • Avoid redirect chains (old → temp → new → final).

For bulk mapping and exports, compare old and new URL lists with TinyUtils Sitemap Delta.

Outcomes (what “success” looks like)

In a recovery like this, “success” usually means:

  • Users stop hitting dead ends on the most important paths.
  • Search Console shows fewer 404 errors over time.
  • Key landing pages return and start earning traffic again.
  • The team has a repeatable process for future changes.

Verification (so you don’t re-break it next week)

After you restore the important pages and add redirects, do a quick validation pass:

  • Crawl the site: check for 404s, redirect chains, and missing images.
  • Spot-check templates: nav/footer links multiply mistakes fast.
  • Re-check the top URLs from your inventory list: they should be one hop (301) to a 200.

Tools like Dead Link Finder and Sitemap Delta make this less miserable, but the important part is the mindset: verify, then iterate.

Lessons learned (aka “the boring secret sauce”)

  1. Inventory first. You can’t fix what you didn’t list.
  2. Prioritize templates. Nav/footer mistakes multiply fast.
  3. Redirect intentionally. “Everything to homepage” is not a strategy.
  4. Verify after launch. Crawl again and confirm.

Next steps

If you’re staring at a list of dead URLs, start with Wayback Fixer to map snapshots at scale. Then build a redirect plan so recovery actually reaches users.