Style and Scripts. How to Extract CSS and JavaScript from Archived Snapshots.

You’ve found the page. The content is there. The layout mostly loads. But something’s off.

No styling. The fonts look wrong. Buttons aren’t working. Interactive elements don’t respond. Welcome to the common frustration of archived snapshots without their CSS or JavaScript.

Most people stop there. But if you’re trying to truly recover or rebuild a page, you’ll want more than just the HTML. You’ll want the supporting files - the stylesheet and scripts that held everything together.

And the good news is: archive.org usually has them. You just need to know where to look - and how to pull them out.

This guide walks you through how to extract CSS and JS files from archived webpages, either manually or using Smartial tools, so you can restore more than just the text. You can bring back structure, style, and even interactive behavior. Let’s get into it.

Why CSS and JS Matter for Recovery

When a page is archived by the Wayback Machine, it tries to save all the referenced resources too: images, stylesheets, fonts, JavaScript libraries, and so on. But rendering them from the archive isn’t always reliable.

You might get a page that loads the basic text but fails to call external CSS files (because the original domain is down) or JavaScript (because it's blocked or broken in the archive wrapper).

That’s especially painful when you’re trying to rebuild a site from an expired domain - as we covered in our guide on recovering lost content. You get the skeleton, but not the skin.

That’s where direct extraction comes in.

Step 1: View Source to Find Linked Assets

Start by going to your archived snapshot. In most browsers, right-click the page and choose “View Page Source” or simply hit Ctrl+U.

Then search for:

<link rel="stylesheet"
<script src="...">
href="...css" or src="...js"

These lines contain the URLs of the CSS and JS files that the page originally used. Sometimes they’re relative (/styles/site.css), sometimes full URLs (https://example.com/assets/main.js).

To point them to archived versions, you can manually prepend the Wayback prefix:

For example, if the snapshot date is 2019-07-21 and the file was at https://example.com/css/style.css, then:

Plug that into your browser and see if it loads. If it does, you’ve got your stylesheet.

Step 2: Use the Smartial Wayback File Sniffer

If you're working with more than one file - or don’t want to dig through HTML manually - use the Smartial Wayback Machine File Sniffer.

Just enter the domain of the archived site and check the boxes for:

font files
images
all non-text files or whatever else...

This will surface every archived file that isn’t HTML or text, including .css, .js, .woff, .ttf, and others. You’ll see a list of URLs directly linked to archive.org that you can download or reference as needed.

This approach is especially helpful when rebuilding the entire look of a site - or when trying to verify how a page looked and behaved at the time it was captured.

Step 3: Copy and Store Locally

Once you’ve located the CSS and JS files you need, it’s a good idea to save them locally. That way, you’re no longer dependent on archive.org to render the styling every time.

You can do this by:

Right-clicking the archive link and choosing “Save As”
Using wget or curl to download them via command line
Writing a script to automate download of a list of archive.org links (happy to help with this if you need PHP or Python)

Once saved, update your HTML files to point to the local copies. This way, you’ll have a standalone version of the page that includes both content and structure.

Restoring Functionality from Archived JavaScript

Not all JS files will work correctly when archived. Some scripts make dynamic calls to APIs or external services that no longer exist. Others are too tightly coupled to live server environments.

But plenty of them do load - and they’re invaluable for:

Rebuilding interactive site behavior (sliders, menus, galleries)
Studying how a site’s frontend worked
Preserving legacy code before a redesign

Even partial restoration of JavaScript gives you much more insight than a static text page ever could.

This is particularly useful when you're trying to recover embedded resources - like downloads triggered by buttons or popups. As we discussed in our guide on recovering embedded PDFs, those resources are often hidden behind JS-triggered links.

What If It’s Missing?

If the CSS or JS file doesn’t load - even via archive.org - it may never have been archived. It could have been excluded by robots.txt at the time, or it simply failed to load when the crawler came by.

You can try whichever you want:

Looking for earlier or later snapshots using the file’s full path in the Wayback Machine
Using the CDX API to see if the file was captured at any other point
Guessing common filenames (main.css, theme.js, etc.) and checking if they exist

But sometimes it’s just gone.

That’s why proactive archiving (via SavePageNow or scripting) is important - and why tools like Smartial’s exist in the first place.

The Web Is More Than Just Text

When you’re recovering old websites, the temptation is to focus on what’s written. But style and behavior matter too. The colors, the layout, the tiny details of interaction - they were part of the message.

Extracting CSS and JS from archived snapshots is restorative. Because to truly understand what a page once was, you need more than content. You need the way it looked and felt.