Features

Core

• Full website download -- HTML, CSS, JS, images, fonts, and all linked assets
• Recursive link discovery -- Automatically follows links in HTML, CSS, and JS files
• Smart URL rewriting -- Converts all links to relative paths for local serving
• Timeframe fallback -- Tries up to three other Wayback Machine timestamps (a day either side and a week earlier) when a resource returns 404
• Bad capture fallback -- When a capture is an archived error (403, 5xx) or a Cloudflare challenge page, uses the nearest capture with status 200 instead, found with one query to the Wayback CDX index
• Real-time progress logging -- Displays download status and file processing as it happens

Asset Handling

• Google Fonts support -- Downloads Google Fonts CSS and font files locally, fixing CORS issues
• Font corruption detection -- Identifies and removes corrupted font files (HTML error pages served as fonts)
• CDN fallback -- When the Wayback Machine lacks a file hosted on Google Fonts, code.jquery.com or the Squarespace CDN, fetches it from that CDN; a missing jquery.min.js is replaced from code.jquery.com with the version its URL names (jquery-1.7.2/, ?ver=3.6.0; 1.9 is also tried as 1.9.0), or 3.7.1 when it names none or code.jquery.com does not have that version (a WordPress ?ver= is often WordPress's own version). Nothing else is fetched live (see How it works)
• Data attribute processing -- Processes data-* attributes containing URLs (videos, images, etc.)

Preservation

• Icon group preservation -- Preserves all links in icon groups (social media, contact icons)
• Button link preservation -- Maintains styling and functionality of button links
• Cookie consent preservation -- Keeps cookie consent popups and functionality intact

Optimization

• HTML minification -- Uses minify-html (Python 3.14+ compatible)
• JS/CSS minification -- Optional JavaScript and CSS minification via rjsmin and cssmin
• Image compression -- Optional image optimization with Pillow
• Tracker/ad removal -- Strips analytics and ads by default, and external iframes when asked
• Link cleanup -- Configurable external link removal with anchor preservation options
• www/non-www normalization -- Drops www. from the archived site's host by default, or adds it with MAKE_WWW

Why Wayback-Archive?

Capability	Wayback-Archive	wget	httrack
Wayback Machine URL rewriting	Yes	No	No
Wayback artifact cleanup	Yes	No	No
Timeframe fallback for 404s	Yes	No	No
Google Fonts localization	Yes	No	No
Font corruption detection	Yes	No	No
CDN fallback	Yes	No	No
HTML/CSS/JS minification	Yes	No	No
Tracker and ad removal	Yes	No	No
data-* attribute processing	Yes	No	No

General-purpose tools like wget --mirror or httrack can download live websites, but they do not understand Wayback Machine URL structures, cannot clean up archive artifacts, and lack the specialized asset recovery that Wayback-Archive provides.