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Is there any way to visit a website without leaving a trace that I have visited at all?

Please note that this question does not ask how to be anonymous but to avoid alerting the website admin that someone (i.e. anyone) has visited in the first place.

If I was to enter the website's address (e.g. www.XYZ.com) into Google say, by entering it directly into the adddress bar (e.g. via www.google.com/#q=www.XYZ.com) and then viewed the cached version of the website then am I correct in thinking that Google would not provide any analytics data that I had searched for the website's address to the website admin if they subscribed to such a service?

I know that strictly speaking I would not be visiting the up to date version of the website in any case but any visit to the website directly could obviously alert the admin and even if the website was not up and running I understand that domain registrant services allow the domain owner to be alerted when someone tries to vist the domain's address.

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    Why would you want that? Caching services like the one from Google only cache sites which already have some visibility, and sites with visibility receive constant background traffic anyway.
    – Philipp
    Jun 10, 2017 at 11:33
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    Could you elaborate as to why you want to do this. Maybe then we can help with a specific solution to your problem
    – ISMSDEV
    Jun 10, 2017 at 12:15
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    I wouldn't call viewing an old copy a "visit"... The answer is no.
    – Free Consulting
    Jun 10, 2017 at 15:58
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    The comments and answers provided are all useful and have made me realise that I should have asked three separate questions. 1. Is it possible to visit a website without the website being alerted to the fact that a visit had been made? And the answer is no. 2. To what extent (e.g. how frequently) are websites, that are not frequently visited if at all, cached by other entities such as the likes of Google and the Wayback machine? 3. Does Google provide any information/data (e.g. search term data) at all to website owners on other internet users accessing the cached versions of their website?
    – Bobby
    Jun 11, 2017 at 8:49
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    Of course you do not want to get answers in the comment section ;) Please consider asking new questions if you want to get those other two answered.
    – anon
    Jun 12, 2017 at 6:12

3 Answers 3

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First of all: There is no way to access a website without the website (and the admin) knowing it. This is not possible since you connect to it to retrieve data. If the website e.g. would broadcast or somebody else on your network (not using https) you could simply sniff the wanted traffic. But that is ofc. not the same thing, since a website can behave differently every time someone accesses it!

You can obviously hide in e.g. TOR network to stay anonymous and retrieve the latest content or ask somebody else to retrieve the website's content for you (e.g. Google's Cache or archive.org's Wayback Machine) and get fairly old content.

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The only way to do this is to use a cached copy of the site (which may pull resources from the site, of course - stop that by not loading images and javascript).

Google had nice caches up until a few years ago. Other search engines may still do it.

http://web.archive.org snapshots the big sites frequently, and many smaller sites less frequently. But smaller sites update less often.

Many sites also have a dev.example.com domain (or similarly named), where you can look at things, though just for browsing that's not too useful.

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It's generally difficult to hide that you visited the site at all. Every web server software logs access (nginx, apache, etc) however most site owners don't check them very often (or even at all).

If you are worried about them knowing your identity or IP Address use Tor Browser, a VPN, or some other open proxy.

You could view the Google Cache or Internet Archive, they generally protect users privacy. So in the case the site owner wouldn't know at all (in most cases).

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