Sometimes it is important to have a PDF copy of a website. This may be for legal reasons, such as proving if someone has stolen your copyrighted material. By storing physical copies of your website at regular points in time.
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This guide is for customizing a scrape in detail. If you'd prefer to use a pre-built scraper templates, our Website to PDF Templates page is the fastest way to get started.
Another common reason is to keep a copy of all your hard work before you close a website or blog. Often years of material may have been written. So rather than lose all of that content you can download the entire website in PDF form for posterity.
But how to save a website as PDF? Fortunately, GrabzIt can easily convert your entire website to a set of PDF files, by using our easy to use web scraper, which is specialist software that can parse a website from the internet. To do this you must first create a scrape for our online web scraper. Our web scraper will then use this scrape to crawl across the link structure of your web site and create a PDF from each web page it finds.
Once the scrape is complete you will receive an email with a link to a ZIP download containing your entire website. Please be patient if you have converted a large website then this could take a little while to download. This can then be saved to your local hard drive, which will allow you to look at your website offline and still be print friendly, if required.
To make the job of creating a scrape that will save a site as PDF even simpler. We have created a template to do all of the hard work for you.
To get started load this template.
Then enter your Target URL, this URL is then automatically checked for errors and any required changes made. Keep the Automatically Start Scrape checkbox ticked, and your scrape will automatically start.
If you want your offline version of the website to have links that go to the correct PDF document for the webpage, then instead use the Scrape Template below. This template will replace the links in the PDF with special local links that connect all the converted web pages.
To link your PDF documents together use this template.
Another option is to compile all web pages into a single PDF document. However, this might be impractical for websites with a large number of pages.
To convert and merge the web pages together into a single PDF document use this template.
If you want to alter the template, uncheck the Automatically Start Scrape checkbox. One alteration would be to run the scrape on a regular schedule, for instance, to create regular copies of a website. On the Schedule Scrape tab, simply click the Repeat Scrape checkbox and then select how frequently you want the scrape to repeat. Then click Update to start the scrape.
Your scrape will now begin. You can see its progress on the manage your scrapes page. It will tell you the current number of web pages that have been converted to PDF and if you expand the scrape you can see the current web page that is being saved as PDF. You can also download a snapshot of the pages that converted to PDF so far.
Remember, some browsers like Internet Explorer, may not allow you to view a PDF file natively. So you may need to install an application like Adobe Acrobat Reader before you can view the PDF files.
Need an editable format instead? Try our Website to Word Converter. This allows you to convert an entire website or web page into DOCX.
Now that you've seen how to customize the options, head over to the templates page to select your starting point and create your PDF archive.
There is a lot you can do with a PDF version of a website including.
There isn't any technology that can stop people from copying your website. However, you can prove they infringed your copyright. A great way to do this is to create a PDF copy of your website content. You can even use GrabzIt's inbuilt Web Monitor to automatically create another PDF copy of your website when a key page changes.
While each PDF file will have a created date visible through the file menu, to prove when the file was created, this can be manipulated. So as added protection you could also use GrabzIt’s timestamp watermark, which will add the time and date a PDF was created to the document. There is now a basic Copy Protection template that does this for you.
However, if you intend to submit a PDF copy of your website to a service such as the U.S. Copyright Office. It is recommended to use the main web scrape template to turn a website into PDF instead.
One way to train ChatGPT bots is to use PDF files as training data. Perhaps you want to train a ChatGPT on your support documentation for your website. Well, GrabzIt provides a great way to get this information.
The best approach is to use the template mentioned above to convert a whole website into PDF files. But be careful when creating the PDF export of your website to specify only the section of the website you want. To avoid getting the whole website as training data. For instance, in the support documentation example, you might specify https://www.mywebsite.com/support/ as the URL.
The time it takes to convert a website varies and depends on three main factors:
Yes, there is a monthly Scrape Page Limit that determines how many pages can be processed.
Yes, pages that rely heavily on JavaScript can be converted. For best results, you should increase the Page Load Delay. This setting forces the scraper to wait for a specified number of milliseconds on a page, giving complex scripts and AJAX content enough time to load and render properly before the capture is made. A common reason for a scrape failing is an insufficient rendering delay.
The goal is to produce a capture "as the user would see it". By default, the conversion options are chosen to make the output look very similar to the live website. However, these settings can be altered, which could change the final appearance. The final fidelity can also be affected if website security restricts access to essential resources like CSS, JavaScript, or images.
You can capture pages from behind a login. The documentation outlines several methods to accomplish this: