How to Use a Web Cache Viewer: Everything You Need to Know

Pages on the internet don’t last forever.

Some disappear overnight without warning. Other times, servers go down, or maybe you’re simply curious what your website or someone else’s looked like ten years ago.

So how do you re-access this information?

You need a web cache viewer.

It’s a tool that helps you recover backups or snapshots of websites.

In this guide, we’ll go through some of the best web cache viewer tools to help you turn back time to find missing information or even spy on your competitors.

What Is a Web Cache Viewer?

A web cache viewer lets you see the older version or snapshot of any website, called a cache page. A cached page is a snapshot of the raw HTML and content of a page.

For example, when Google indexes your website, it takes a screenshot of what it looks like at the time and indexes it.

There are several tools to view an archived page, such as Google’s cache feature on search results and websites like the Wayback Machine dedicated to saving the internet’s history.

When to Use a Web Cache Viewer

A web cache viewer is a valuable tool to have in your back pocket. Here are a few times you might want to use this handy tool.

A Website Is No Longer Available

Need to get information from a page with a pesky 404 error? A web cache viewer can help you see the last archived version before it went offline.

A Page You Want to View Has Changed

If a website went through a major makeover, you could use the cached version to revert the site to what it used to look like. This is particularly helpful for doing competitor analysis. For example, if a competitor suddenly overtook your site in the search results, you can look at older versions of their site to see what they changed.

Improve Your SEO

Not seeing the SEO results you want? Did you know page caching can improve your site speed by reducing server load time by up to 80 percent? Viewing the cached version shows you what Google sees when it crawls your page. If your website is not cached, it can increase your page load times and drastically affect your bounce rate.

View a Page Faster

If the web page is slow or unresponsive, you can use the cached version to see a snapshot of the site the last time Google indexed the page. Although a cached page won’t always have up-to-date information, it can help you save time.