Agencies accumulate servers. A site launches, the project closes, and the install keeps running because nobody wants to be the person who takes it down. Ten years in, we were paying every month for a row of WordPress installs that had not been edited since the week they went live.

None of them needed to be WordPress. They needed to be readable.

A finished site is a document

Once a project is over, a site stops behaving like software and starts behaving like a record. Nobody is logging in. Nothing is being published. The database, the plugins and the PHP are there to keep a fixed set of pages available, at a monthly cost, with a security surface that grows every year you look away.

So we started mirroring them. Crawl the live site, keep the HTML, the images and the fonts, host the result as flat files. The pages look identical. They load faster than they ever did. They cost nothing to keep and there is nothing left to patch.

Why it is worth the afternoon

Some of it is money, and the money is real. Most of it is that work disappears. Clients get acquired, brands get retired, a hosting bill lapses while nobody is watching, and a year of somebody’s best work goes with it. We have lost projects that way. It is a bad feeling for everyone involved and it is entirely avoidable.

An archive is also the honest version of a portfolio. A case study is our account of a project, written afterwards, with the awkward parts smoothed out. The site itself is the thing we actually made.

If you have work sitting on a server you are quietly paying for, it is worth an afternoon. The version that survives is the one that does not need anything running.