How to download the entire website for offline reading

Although wifi is everywhere today, sometimes you will go to places where there is no wifi. For example, if you join a 12-hour international flight, downloading the entire site can be a great alternative to e-books, audio books, podcasts and movies. But how do you download a website? It's easier than you think! Here are four tools that allow you to do that.

1. WebCopy (Windows)

WebCopy of Cyotek retrieves a web page URL and scans links, pages and media. When searching for pages, it will find links, pages and media until the entire site is discovered. You can then use the configuration options to decide which part to download.

The interesting thing about WebCopy is that you can set up many "projects" that each has its own settings and configurations. This allows you to easily reload many different websites whenever you want, each time exactly the same way. A project can copy multiple websites, thus using them with a plan (eg a "Technology" project to copy technology sites).

To download a website with WebCopy:

1. Install and launch the application.

2. Navigate to File> New to create a new project.

3. Enter the URL in the Website field.

4. Change the Save folder field to where you want to save the web page.

5. Consider WebCopy rules select Project> Rules .

6. Navigate to File> Save As . to save the project.

7. Click Copy Website in the toolbar to start the page loading process.

After copying is complete, you can use the Results tab to view the status of each page and / or multimedia file. The Errors tab displays any possible problems and the Skipped tab displays files that are not downloaded. But most importantly, Sitemap , shows the full directory structure of the website discovered by WebCopy.

To view the website offline, open File Explorer and navigate to the saved folder that you specified. Open index.html (or sometimes index.htm ) in your browser to start browsing.

2. HTTrack (Windows, Linux, Android)

HTTrack is more popular than WebCopy and is considered better because it is open source and available on platforms other than Windows, but the interface is a bit complicated. However, it works well so don't let that make you ignore this application.

Like WebCopy, this application uses a project-based approach, which allows you to copy multiple websites and keep them neat. You can pause, continue to download and update sites that are copied by reloading old and new files.

To download a site with HTTrack:

1. Install and launch the application.

2. Click Next to start creating a new project.

3. Provide the name, category, base path for the project, and then click Next .

4. Select Download web site (s) , then enter each website URL in the Web Addresses box, one for each URL. You can also save URLs in the TXT file and import that file, which is very convenient when you want to reload the same site. Click Next .

5. Adjust the parameters if you want, then click Finish .

Once everything has been downloaded, you can browse the website as usual by going to the downloaded file and opening index.html or index.htm in the browser.

3. SiteSucker (Mac, iOS)

If you are using a Mac, the best option for you is SiteSucker. This simple tool extracts the entire site and maintains the same overall structure and includes all related media files (eg images, PDF files, sheets). It has a clean and easy to use interface, just paste the website URL and press Enter .

Another convenient feature of this application is the ability to save what downloads into a file, then use that file to download the same file and the same structure later (or on another computer). This feature allows SiteSucker to pause page loading and continue later.

SiteSucker is priced at $ 5 and doesn't have a free version or a trial version, which may be its biggest drawback. The latest version requires macOS 10.11 El Capitan or newer. The older version of SiteSucker is available for older Mac systems, but some features may be missing.

4. Wget (Windows, Mac, Linux)

Wget is a command line utility that can retrieve all file types via HTTP and FTP protocols. Since the website is hosted via HTTP and most web media files are accessible via HTTP or FTP, this makes Wget a great tool for extracting web pages.

While Wget is often used to download individual files, it can be used to download all pages and files found via the original page:

wget -r -p //www.quantrimang.com

However, some websites can detect and prevent what you are trying to do because ripping a site can cause them to lose a lot of bandwidth. To do this, you can 'disguise' it as a web browser with a user agent string:

wget -r -p -U Mozilla //www.quantrimang.com

If you want, you should also limit the download speed (so you won't take up server bandwidth) and pause between each download (so you don't overload the web server with too many requests):

wget -r -p -U Mozilla --wait = 10 --limit-rate = 35K //www.quantrimang.com

Wget comes with most Unix-based systems. On a Mac, you can install Wget using a Homebrew command: brew install wget . On Windows, you will need to use this ported version instead.

1. Instructions for installing software with Homebrew on macOS X

The bigger the site, the more downloads, so don't save too large websites because you need thousands of MB to store all the media files that the site uses. The best sites to download are pages with lots of text and not many images and sites that don't often add new or changed pages.

So you know four tools to be able to download the entire offline reading site, hoping the article will be useful and you can share it with your friends.