I keep an old bookmarks folder that I have carried from computer to computer for over a decade. It is called “Good stuff,” which tells you how much thought I put into organizing it. A few months ago, I opened it out of curiosity and started clicking through. The first link led to an error page. The second went to a domain now selling something unrelated. The third opened, but the images were gone. By the time I had gone through fifty links, more than half were broken, changed beyond recognition, or simply gone.
That folder had held some of my favourite corners of the internet: a small blog about city walks, a hand-built website about old radios, a forum where people shared stories about their grandparents, a personal page of someone’s photographs from a trip in the early 2000s. I had assumed they would always be there. They were not. That realization pushed me to look into why websites disappear, and it led me to start saving the parts of the web that matter to me.
The web is far less permanent than it feels
We tend to think of the internet as a permanent record. People warn each other that anything posted online stays there forever, and in some ways that is true, especially for embarrassing photos and old social media posts. But for ordinary websites, the reality is often the opposite. Pages disappear constantly.
This phenomenon has a name: link rot. Links that once worked stop working, because the page they point to has moved, changed, or been deleted. Researchers who have studied it have found that a large share of links on the web break over time, including links in news articles, academic papers, and even legal documents. The older a link is, the more likely it is to be dead.
There is a related problem sometimes called content drift, where the link still works but the page it points to now contains something completely different. A link that once led to a helpful article might now lead to a different article, an advertisement, or a page selling something unrelated. The address survived. The content did not.
Why websites vanish
When I looked into the websites from my bookmarks folder, the reasons for their disappearance were usually mundane. Many were personal projects, run by one person as a hobby. When that person lost interest, got busy, or simply forgot to renew their domain name, the site disappeared. Hosting costs money, and even small costs are easy to stop paying when a site no longer feels important.
Some disappeared because the platforms that hosted them shut down. Over the years, many free blogging services, photo-hosting sites, and online communities have closed, sometimes taking millions of pages with them. When a company decides a service is no longer profitable, the content people created there can vanish almost overnight.
Others disappeared during redesigns. Organizations rebuild their websites every few years, and old pages are often not carried over. A useful guide or article that existed on an old version of a site might simply not survive the move, even if the organization itself is still around. Businesses close, domains expire and get bought by others, and the web slowly rewrites itself.
What we lose when small sites disappear
It might seem like the loss of a few hobby websites does not matter much. But those small, personal sites often held knowledge and perspectives that exist nowhere else. The radio website in my bookmarks contained detailed repair notes for specific old models, written by someone who had spent decades working on them. That information was not in any book. When the site disappeared, it was simply gone.
The forum about grandparents was full of personal stories: memories of wartime, recipes passed down through generations, descriptions of villages that no longer exist. It was a kind of informal oral history, written by thousands of ordinary people. I have no idea whether anyone saved it.
Small websites also represent a certain kind of internet culture that feels increasingly rare. Before social media centralized so much of our online lives, people built their own little corners of the web, with their own designs, quirks, and personalities. Those sites were messy and imperfect, but they were individual. As they disappear, the web becomes more uniform, dominated by large platforms that look the same everywhere.
The strange afterlife of expired domains
One of the most unsettling things I found in my bookmarks was what happened to some expired domains. When a website owner stops paying for their domain name, it does not simply disappear. It becomes available for anyone to buy. And some people buy expired domains precisely because they once had visitors and links pointing to them.
The city walks blog I loved now redirects to a page full of generic travel advertisements. Another old hobby site has become a thin page of unrelated product reviews, still using the original name. For anyone following an old link, it can look as though the original author changed direction entirely, when in fact the site simply passed into someone else’s hands.
This is part of why content drift can be so misleading. A dead link at least tells you honestly that something is gone. A link that leads to a completely different site wearing an old name can confuse people, and in some cases, it can be used to trick visitors into trusting something they should not. It made me much more cautious about following very old links without checking where they actually lead.
The people working to preserve the web
Fortunately, I am far from the first person to worry about this. There are organizations that have spent years archiving the web. The best known is a nonprofit digital library that runs a service regularly capturing snapshots of websites and storing them for the public to browse. Using it, I was able to find archived versions of several of my lost bookmarks, including the radio repair site and parts of the city walks blog.
Seeing those archived pages was an emotional experience. The designs were old-fashioned, some images were missing, but the words were there. The repair notes, the walking routes, the photographs. It felt like finding an old letter in a drawer.
But archives are not complete. They cannot capture everything, and they often miss pages that were rarely linked or were behind logins. Several of my bookmarks had never been archived at all, and those are truly gone. Libraries, universities, and national archives in various countries also collect websites, often focusing on their own country’s web, but no single effort can capture everything.
How I started saving the web for myself
After this experience, I changed how I deal with online content I care about. Bookmarks, I realized, are not the same as saving something. A bookmark is just an address, and addresses can break. If I want to keep something, I need to keep a copy.
For articles and guides I find useful, I now save a copy of the page. Most browsers can save a page as a file or print it to a PDF, and there are read-later apps that store the text of articles so they remain available even if the original disappears. It takes a few seconds, and it means I am no longer depending on someone else to keep their site online.
For pages that I think others might want to find too, I submit them to the public web archive, which lets anyone request a snapshot of a page. It is a small contribution, but it helps ensure that the page exists somewhere other than its original server.
I also started keeping a simple folder of saved pages, organized by topic, alongside my bookmarks. The bookmarks help me find the live sites. The folder guarantees I still have the content if they disappear.
What this means for our own content
Thinking about disappearing websites also made me think about my own digital life. Much of what I have written and shared online lives on platforms I do not control: social media posts, comments, photos uploaded to various services. If any of those platforms shut down or change their rules, my content could disappear with them.
I have started downloading copies of the things I care about most. Many services offer a way to export your data, and while the process is sometimes clunky, it is worth doing occasionally. My photos, my writing, and my important messages now exist in more than one place.
For this blog, too, I keep regular backups. It would be ironic to write about the disappearing web and then lose my own site to a technical problem or an expired payment. If I care about something existing in the future, I have to take some responsibility for keeping it.
Why this matters beyond nostalgia
It would be easy to dismiss all of this as nostalgia for an older internet. But link rot has practical consequences too. News articles cite sources that no longer exist. Academic papers reference web pages that have vanished, making it harder for future researchers to verify claims. Government and legal documents sometimes link to pages that have since been moved or removed.
When the evidence behind a claim disappears, it becomes harder to check whether that claim was accurate. In a time when people already struggle to separate reliable information from unreliable information, losing the original sources makes that task even harder. Preserving the web is not only about remembering the past. It is also about keeping the record straight.
A more fragile internet than we imagine
The internet often feels infinite and permanent, but it is actually fragile, maintained by countless individuals, companies, and organizations who each have to keep paying, updating, and caring. When any of them stops, a small piece of the web disappears. Over years, those small losses add up to enormous gaps.
That does not mean we should panic, but it does mean we should be more intentional. If something online matters to you, save it. If a small website has helped you, consider telling its creator, or supporting it if you can. People are more likely to keep running a site when they know someone values it.
The bookmarks folder, revisited
I still have my “Good stuff” folder, but it looks different now. I removed the dead links and replaced many of them with links to archived versions. For the sites that still exist, I saved copies of the pages I love most. And I added a few new sites, small personal corners of the web that I have discovered recently, with their own quirks and personalities.
This time, I have saved them properly. I do not know how long they will last online. Nobody does. But at least this time, if they disappear, a small piece of them will stay with me.
