Ever needed to gather information from a website for a personal project, market research, or to track prices, but didn't want to pay for a complicated tool? Manually copying and pasting is slow and tedious, but many automated solutions come with a hefty price tag.
The good news is that you can automatically extract data from virtually any website for free. This guide will walk you through how to use a powerful web scraper to do just that, without needing to write a single line of code.
To begin, you can sign up for a free plan that allows you to scrape a set number of pages every month. The free tier provides 50 scrapes per month, which is perfect for small projects or for learning how the tool works.
Extracting data might sound technical, but a scraping wizard makes the process simple. Here’s how you can get started in just a few steps:
Enter Your Target URL: First, specify the main URL of the website you want to extract data from. The scraper will start its journey from this page.
Select the Data You Want: Once the page loads in the wizard, you can simply click on the data you want to extract, such as product names, prices, or article titles. The tool is smart enough to identify repeating data, so if you click on one item in a list, it will automatically select all similar items on the page.
Create Your Dataset: After selecting the data, you can rename the columns to keep everything organized, for instance, "Product Name" or "Price". You can also apply different criteria to clean up your data, such as removing duplicates or sorting the results.
Run the Scrape and Export: Once you’re happy with the setup, you can start the scrape. The tool will navigate the website and pull the data you specified into a clean, structured table. You can then export your results in a variety of useful formats.
You aren't limited to just viewing the data online. The real power comes from being able to download it for your own use. You can export your scraped data into several standard formats, including: Excel spreadsheets, JSON, CSV, SQL, XML.
To make the most of your 50 free pages, it’s a good idea to test your scrape first. You can use the Limit Scrape option to tell the scraper to only visit a small number of pages, like 5 or 10. This lets you confirm that the scraper is working as expected before you commit to a larger task.
Ready to start extracting data? Sign up for a free account today and see how easy it is to turn websites into valuable, structured data.