Guides · Updated 1 November 2026

Lost the Figma file? How to get your website's design back

First check Figma's trash, the file's version history, the team owner's files and any local .fig copies, because deleted files stay in the trash until someone removes them for good. If the file is truly gone, import the live website back into Figma as editable layers and rebuild the system from that.

The agency that designed your site wound down two years ago. The freelancer who did the last refresh doesn’t answer email. Or the file was in the drafts of a colleague whose account was removed when they left. Now there’s a redesign to plan, or just a new landing page to add, and the only complete record of the design is the website itself.

This happens to a lot of teams, and the order of the search matters. Figma keeps more than people expect, so start there. If the file really is gone, the live site still holds most of the design, and it can be turned back into editable layers.

Check Figma before you rebuild

The trash. Deleted files aren’t removed straight away. According to Figma’s help centre, they stay in the trash until someone restores them or deletes them permanently. Restoring needs edit access to the file and to its folder, and the original folder and team must still exist. If the folder is gone, you can restore a copy to your drafts, without its comments, version history or library connections.

Version history. If the file exists but someone overwrote the design, open the version history. Restoring an older version doesn’t delete the newer ones, so it is safe to try. You need edit access.

Files of people who left. When a member leaves a team, the files they owned in it pass to the team owner. Ask whoever owns the team, often the person who pays for Figma, to search for it. On organization plans, admins can also manage the drafts of removed users, which is where unshared work tends to sit.

A deleted team. If a whole team was deleted, its owner or an admin has 28 days to restore it, according to Figma’s team restore guide. After that, the files are gone.

Copies outside Figma. Figma can save a local .fig copy of any file, and careful agencies keep these as backups or hand them over at the end of a project. Search shared drives, project handover folders and old email attachments for .fig files. Ask the former agency directly, too: many keep archives of past client work for years.

When the file is really gone

If none of that turns anything up, the live website becomes your source. It is a more complete record than it looks. Every colour, font size, spacing value and component that shipped is defined in its code, at every width the site supports.

Screenshots capture none of that structure. Redrawing from them by eye takes days and produces an approximation. An import plugin reads the rendered page and rebuilds it as Figma layers. With Figback you paste the URL and get frames at desktop, tablet and mobile widths (1440, 768 and 390 by default), with flex and grid layouts as auto layout, repeated elements as components and colours and type as variables and text styles.

Pages behind a login, such as an account area or an admin panel, can’t be loaded from outside. For those, Figback’s Chrome extension, Figback Capture, saves the tab you are looking at while logged in, and the plugin imports the file. Our guide on importing a page behind a login walks through it.

Rebuild the system from the import

An imported site needs a cleanup pass before anyone would want to maintain it. Treat the first pass as an inventory:

1. Import one page of each template: home, a listing page, a detail page, forms, and the pages that convert.
2. Review the variables and text styles the import created, and merge near-duplicates into a deliberate palette and type scale.
3. Check the detected components, keep the variants that are real states, and remove accidental differences.
4. Name things the way your team will search for them.
5. Save the result as a library, so new pages use it instead of copying frames.

Our guide on redesigning an existing website in Figma covers this process in more depth.

What the live site can’t give back

A website only shows what shipped. Several things in the original file never reached production, and an import can’t recover them.

Interaction states are the first gap. Hover, focus, pressed and error states exist in the CSS but only appear when someone interacts with the page, so a static import shows the resting state. Recreate them as variants once the base components are in place.

Unbuilt work is the second. Explorations, rejected directions, pages designed but never launched and notes for developers lived only in the file. If the redesign depended on them, the former designer’s memory or an old presentation PDF is the only place left to look.

Source artwork is the third. Illustrations and icons that shipped as SVG come back as vectors, but anything exported as a bitmap returns as an image, at the resolution the site used. If you need the originals, ask whoever made them.

And if the site itself has changed since the file was lost, older versions may survive in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Open a snapshot in your browser and capture it with the extension, then delete the archive’s toolbar from the frame.

Keep it from happening again

The fix is mostly about ownership. Keep design files in a team your company owns, not in someone’s personal drafts. Make the transfer of files part of every agency contract and every offboarding checklist. Save a local .fig copy of the main library after each major release. These habits cost a few minutes and spare you the search above.

Questions

Can I recover a deleted Figma file?

Usually, yes. Deleted files go to the trash in Figma's file browser and stay there until someone permanently deletes them. Restoring needs edit access to the file and its folder, and the original folder and team must still exist.

Can I turn a live website back into a Figma file?

Yes. An import plugin such as Figback rebuilds the page as Figma layers with auto layout, components and variables. You get what the site shows today, so states and pages that were never built have to be redesigned.