How to Archive a Website for Legal and Compliance

If you're searching for how to archive a website and have found yourself here, it’s likely because you’ve already tried to archive your website and realized that relying on screenshots, open source and manual software, or CMS backups is not going to work.

Website legal compliance is not optional — it's you organization's shield against the risks of the digital world.

Before hash values, proving the authenticity of digital evidence could be tricky — especially if opposing counsel was determined to exclude the evidence.

Managing electronically stored information (ESI) is a challenge for most organizations today. Numerous, diverse data sources, from websites and social media accounts to internal chat platforms, are creating huge volumes of information, making eDiscovery, litigation readiness, and responding to requests for ESI difficult, if not impossible.

Did you know that nearly 1/3 of companies have been fined by courts or regulatory agencies because the organization couldn’t respond in time to requests for electronically stored information (ESI)?

Financial industry recordkeeping regulatory requirements like the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Rules 17a-3 and 17a-4, and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) Rules 4511 and 2210, play a crucial role in maintaining the integrity of the U.S. financial markets. These regulations are not just bureaucratic formalities; their oversight involves ensuring that financial services firms adhere to stringent record retention requirements, essential for the transparency, accountability, and trust that underpin the financial system.

Since 2019, the number of users on Microsoft Teams has risen 1500%, from a modest 20 million users in the pre-pandemic year (2019) to over 320 million users in 2024. Microsoft's collaboration platform is now the default messaging app for over one million organisations.

Pagefreezer now offers Microsoft Teams archiving as part of its legal and compliance solutions.

Any business that deals with sensitive information needs a document retention policy. Does your business have staff you keep records on, for example? If so, your business deals with sensitive information.

Building websites used to require a lot of time, knowledge, and manual coding. But with today's sophisticated content management systems (CMSs), building and managing a website is much easier. While customizing features may require technical know-how, the general rule is that most websites are built and powered by an intuitive and user-friendly CMS. However, CMSs were not expressly designed for archiving data. Storing CMS data requires more than hitting save when updating a page. A CMS is not an archive system; your website data isn't necessarily automatically saved in versions—nor is the backup data easy to access. That means you may struggle to identify and access the backed-up data you want to access. Hence, it's best to have a system dedicated to archiving and backups.