Maybe the site still loads but nobody dares touch it. Maybe the files are gone, the developer is uncontactable, or an account lapsed and took the site with it. Website recovery covers both: we recover what's there, reconstruct what's gone, and rebuild it on a modern, maintainable footing. We're a small studio in north Norfolk, a short drive from Norwich, recovering and rebuilding old websites for businesses there and across the UK. Quoted after the assessment, in writing, before any work begins.
What we mean by it
Website recovery covers two related situations. They often overlap, and we handle both.
It still loads, but it was built a long time ago: in Dreamweaver or FrontPage, in hand-coded table-based HTML, or on a content system that's no longer supported. It looks dated, it doesn't work properly on phones, nobody can safely edit it, and the person who originally built it is long gone. It works, just about, but it's holding the business back.
The files are gone, the old host has vanished, the developer is uncontactable, a migration went wrong, or an account lapsed and took the site with it. Part of the site, or all of it, simply isn't there any more.
Archive recovery
When a website has disappeared, with no files and no backup, it often still exists somewhere. Web archives, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine chief among them, quietly capture and store snapshots of public websites over the years. If your old site was online, there's a real chance a version of it was archived while it was.
We recover sites from those archives: the pages, the text, the images, the structure. We've done enough of this work to have built our own command-line tool that automates much of the retrieval, which makes recovery faster, more thorough, and cheaper than picking through an archive by hand.
How we work
A few things that shape every recovery project at BrainWeb.
Every recovery starts with finding out what exists: live files, old backups, archive snapshots, content scattered across other places. Until we know what there is to work with, there's no quote worth giving. The assessment comes first.
Plenty in an old site is still good: the words, the photographs, the company history, the hard-won search ranking. Recovery isn't demolition. We carry the worthwhile parts forward and rebuild around them, rather than throwing everything out by default.
The recovered site is rebuilt on a modern footing: WordPress with Divi, or a modern JS framework, whichever suits the business. The result is responsive, secure, editable, and no longer dependent on tools or people you can't reach.
A recovery is a natural moment to fix what the old site got wrong: mobile that never worked, a structure that confused people, content long out of date. We won't quietly redesign the whole thing under cover of a recovery, but we will flag what's worth improving and quote it openly.
An old site often has years of accumulated search standing. We preserve URLs where we can, redirect them where we can't, and bring the site back without surrendering the ranking it built up.
Which service is which
A rough test: if your site still works and you simply want it faster and more secure, that's a conversion. If your site is dated, unmaintainable, or partly missing, that's a recovery.
For a site that is old, broken, or partly lost. The work is rescuing or reconstructing a site that has reached the end of its life, and rebuilding it from there.
For a site that is working and reasonably current, a maintained WordPress site, that you want re-platformed onto a modern JS framework for speed and security. Nothing is broken; you are upgrading the foundations.
What's included
Recovery projects vary widely, but every one includes the following.
Recent Work
A second website for a second business, launched off the back of Tank Clad's capability but sold under its own name, because the two serve different buyers.
What we built
WordPress Web Design · WordPress Development with Divi · Managed WordPress Hosting
A WordPress site for a family-run Norfolk campervan converter, built around a custom conversions portfolio, a dedicated services and FAQ hub, and a refreshed logo suite for light and dark use.
What we built
WordPress Website Design & Build · Custom Post Type · Managed WordPress Hosting
A multi-page WordPress site for an international aerospace and quality consultancy, built to give a newly formed firm a credible home and ready it for the 2026 standards.
“Ric was suggested to my by a complete stranger and I have been very pleased with his work. … I would certainly recommend Ric to anyone out there.”
A complete website for a Norfolk Broads education charity, built around several very different audiences so each one finds its own clear way in.
What we built
WordPress Web Design
We rebuilt our own site as a WordPress-to-Astro conversion, the same service we sell, built to the same standards we ship to clients, so the site is the proof rather than the claim.
What we built
Web Design · Web Development · Website Hosting · Content Creation
What it costs
Recovery can't be priced from a list, because no two jobs start from the same place. A tidy legacy site with its files intact is a different job from reconstructing a lost site piece by piece from archive snapshots, so a recovery is always quoted after the assessment, never before. Once we know what exists and what can be brought back, you get a fixed written quote; smaller jobs run at the hourly development rate, agreed up front. The figure we agree is the figure on the invoice.
Related work
Recovery sits alongside two other specialist services in the Build pillar.
The first conversation costs nothing and commits you to nothing. Tell us about the site, what state it's in, what you've still got and what's been lost, and we'll come back with a view on what can be recovered and what the rebuild would involve.