Web archiving entails collecting and saving web content in a digital archive. It is the most effective way of capturing and storing web content in a permanent form to facilitate information governance and compliance with regulations.
Organizations archive web content for a wide range of reasons. The aim could be to prevent intellectual property theft, comply with industry standards, protect themselves from false claims, or preserve history.
There are several ways of saving a website. For example, you can save web pages on a hard drive or online resources such as HTTrack, Wayback Machine, or a CMS application. However, the best option is an automatic website archiving solution. Storing web content in an archive allows you to access the data at any time for analysis and reference. We have highlighted six business benefits of archiving websites.
Legal Requirements
Most organizations need to archive web content for legal reasons. If they fail to archive, they may end up disposing of information they should be keeping for regulatory requirements. Disposing important data can attract severe penalties, especially if the authorities determine that they have violated industry policies.
The food and beverage sector has many regulations and also attracts large numbers of litigations. For instance, major brands often face lawsuits for the product descriptions and nutritional content posted on their websites. Such firms need to save and preserve web content to prove compliance with the regulation and use it as evidence during litigations.
In the financial sector, agencies, such as the FCA and SEC, continually release regulations relating to web content. The policies require financial institutions to preserve details of their online communications for use as evidence of compliance. Firms that fail compliance tests may incur heavy penalties, face costly lawsuits, or lose clients.
Healthcare is another sector with many regulations due to the need to ensure critical medical products, drugs, and devices are safe. Healthcare providers have to ensure that their online content complies with regulations to avoid costly court battles.
The highly volatile regulatory environment in these sectors forces organizations to archive web content to make it easy to monitor changes, such as deletions and additions to pages on company websites. Firms also need to archive online communications, including social media posts, to capture all the deleted or edited posts in real-time.
Create A Reliable Backup
Many organizations like to preserve their web content for a certain period to ensure that they can access this information even if their website goes down. Archived webpages mitigate against hazards and can be retrieved as long as reliable archivists manage them.
Archives have several advantages over ordinary website backups. Archives provide better content visibility and control than backups. The best archiving software allows you to open old webpages as if they are active and even include navigation and video content. They also index the content and allow access in a way that minimizes data consumption.
Business websites may contain original and unique content. When updating such websites, the organization may lose valuable information. Web archiving maintains robust historical web records while ensuring that the content is accessible in the original format. They offer a superior user experience and meet regulatory requirements for authentic copies.
Protecting Firms from False Claims
Web content is a key component of modern business communications. It often captures essential legal documents, including promotions, offers, and online transactions. Archiving helps preserve such records for use in legal processes.
Web archives are critical to the operations of eCommerce websites. For instance, a drug or food vendor may face suits from customers claiming that a particular webpage provided false information about a product. The vendor can use the web archives to show that the customer is making false claims by referencing the page on a specific date.
Support Marketing Initiatives
Archived webpages can help the marketing team trace a page that was live on the company website on a particular date. For instance, they may find that the business made many conversions in a specific week and use the archive to access the content that resonated so well with clients. A good archiving software will allow them to compare pages and see how content changed over time. They can then cross-reference with the conversion rates to determine the effectiveness of a marketing campaign.
Preserve Institutional Memory
In a world that is increasingly embracing digital technology, firms can use archiving solutions to document their online history. Digital records, such as webpages and social media accounts, can replace photos, brochures, and newspaper articles as repositories of organizational memory. Firms can use these records to capture major events and milestones in a digital format.
