It's easy to forget the impermanence of the internet. Pages are edited without warning and websites can disappear overnight.

There are plenty of ways to lose access to a site or web page. Maybe the servers are down(Opens in a new window), or perhaps the site owner has altered or removed the content you're trying to find. In these cases, one option is to view the cached version.

Google regularly crawls the web searching for new pages to index, while also saving backup copies of the pages it scans. Web browsers do the same in order to load pages faster. These snapshots are preserved in the cache—an area of your local hard drive that is temporarily accessible if a site goes down or certain content is removed. Not all websites are indexed by Google or saved in a cache, but for those that are, here's how to access them.

To view a page's cache, start a search and find the page you are looking for. In Google, click the three-dot menu next to the result to open the About this result pop-up page. Click the Cached button within the pop-up to view a cached version of the website.

When the site loads, Google will notify you it is an older version and list when the snapshot was taken. You'll also have the option to view a text-only version of the page, as well as its source code. However, be aware that you won't be able to navigate to any other pages and remain in the cached version; you'll be taken to the live site if you try.

Bing users only need to find the search result they are looking for, then click the arrow next to the site URL. Choose Cached from the small menu to open a cached version of the website with a banner indicating it is not the live page.

A much easier way to view a cached website is to use a search modifier. type cache: in the address bar and add the URL without leaving a space. The browser will pull up the cached version of the website in question.

Viewing cached versions of websites only goes so far. A number of entities are devoted to preserving internet history; most prominent is the nonprofit Internet Archive(Opens in a new window), which hosts websites, texts, video, audio, software, and images that can be hard to find anywhere else. You can view even older versions of a website with the Wayback Machine(Opens in a new window), which works for live and offline websites.

Enter the URL you want to explore, and the archival search engine will show a calendar that indicates when the Wayback Machine crawled that page. Click a date on the calendar to see what the site looked like on that day. The Wayback Machine is a great way to view the history of the internet; archived versions of PCMag.com date back to Dec. 19, 1996.

The archiving website Archive.Today(Opens in a new window) allows users to save current web pages and also search for existing entries that have previously been saved. Entering a URL for saving allows you to view a web page as it currently exists, save it to the site, and download the page to your computer.

If you want to view archived versions of a website, enter the URL in the appropriate search bar and Archive.Today will populate results for the homepage and associated individual pages. If there are multiple versions of the same page, they will be stacked together for easy viewing.

PCMag's website, for instance, is archived as far back as 2012 and currently has four different versions of the homepage saved on the service.

Browser extensions can also access cached sites. Add Web Cache Viewer(Opens in a new window) to Chrome and right-click on any page to view the Google or Wayback Machine version of the web page. The Web Archives extension for Chrome(Opens in a new window) and Firefox(Opens in a new window) goes even further, letting you view cached web page versions from more than a dozen search engines, including Bing, Baidu, and Yandex.

Other online tools include Cached Page(Opens in a new window), which searches a given URL across the Google web cache, Internet Archive, and archiving service WebCite. Google Cache Checker(Opens in a new window) also checks whether a site is indexed by Google and pulls up any cached web pages it finds.

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