Rebuilding a 7,230-URL site from the Wayback Machine into WordPress: CDX, raw bytes and legacy ?p= URLs
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When a site goes offline without a backup, or you buy an expired domain with history, the usual advice is to run a downloader from GitHub. Tools like wayback-machine-downloader do a fair job of fetching files, but you end up with a folder of static HTML, legacy URLs like ?p=123 saved as files your host won't serve, and no record of what the archive never had. I've built 150+ sites on expired domains over the past two years, and since spring 2026 I restore sites from the archive into WordPress w