How to Download a Website's HTML, Images & CSS Resources
There are many situations where you need to download an entire website. Whether you want to view a site offline, create a backup, or extract the raw source code, GrabzIt’s Web Scraper automates the entire process by crawling the target site and downloading the HTML alongside all referenced resources (CSS, scripts, and images).
Choose the method below that best fits your needs.This tutorial covers downloading raw HTML and source code. If you want to convert pages into a readable document, read our guide on How to Convert a Website to PDF.
Method 1 - Download as a Single-File HTML (Easiest)
Our Download Website to Single-File HTML template automatically handles all path rewriting for you. Instead of a folder of separate images and CSS, it converts every webpage into one self-contained HTML file that can be opened instantly in any browser.
To get started load this template.
Method 2 - Download as a ZIP Archive (Raw Code & Assets)
If you need the original source code, separate CSS files, and raw images, you can use our standard Website Downloader template to extract a ZIP file of the website.
To get started load this template.
Enter your Target URL, the system automatically checks this URL for errors. Keep the Automatically Start Scrape checkbox ticked, and your scrape will automatically start.
Customizing your Scrape
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 the Update button to start the scrape.
Using your Downloaded Website
Once the web scraping has finished you can download it as a ZIP file. Unzip the file to find a folder named Files containing all downloaded web pages and website resources. There will also be a special HTML page called data.html in the root of the directory. Open this file in a web browser and you will find a HTML table with three columns:
- Resource URL - this is the URL the web scraper found the resource at. So for example: http://www.example.com/logo.jog
-
Resource Type - the type of resource downloaded, this consists of four types.
- Web Page
- Image
- External Resource - any resource downloaded from a Link tag
- Script
- New File Name - the new file name that the resource has been saved under. Note that this is column also contains a link to the file, which makes inspecting all the downloaded resource much easier.
This file helps you map the new filenames to their old locations. This is necessary because a URL cannot directly map to a file structure! As a URL can exceed the size limit for direct storage in the file path.
Also there can be many permutations of a URL. Especially when a web page can represent a lot of different content by changing various query string parameters! So instead we store the website in a flat structure in the file folder and give you data.html file to map these files to the original structure.
Of course because of this you can't open a downloaded HTML page and expect to see the web page you saw on the web. To do this you would need to rewrite the paths of the image, script and CSS resources etc found in the HTML file. So that the web browser can find them in your local file structure.You need to do this to view a website offline.
In the root of the ZIP file there is another file called Website.csv. This contains exactly the same information as the data.html file.
However, you can use this in case you want to read and process the website download programmatically. Perhaps using the mapping from the URL’s to the files to recreate the downloaded website.
