How to Take a Full-Page Screenshot of an Entire Website
Your browser can already do this. You do not need an extension, and you do not need to stitch screenshots together by hand. Every major browser can capture the entire height of a page, including everything below the fold.
Chrome
Open the page, then press Ctrl+Shift+P on Windows, or Cmd+Shift+P on a Mac, to open the command menu inside Developer Tools. If Developer Tools is not open, press F12 first. Type screenshot and choose Capture full size screenshot. Chrome saves a PNG of the whole page.
Firefox
Right-click anywhere on the page and choose Take Screenshot, then Save full page. Firefox has had this built in for years and it needs no Developer Tools.
Edge
Press Ctrl+Shift+S to open Web capture, then choose Capture full page. You can mark it up before saving.
Safari
On a Mac, turn on the Develop menu in Settings, then open the Web Inspector, find the <html> element in the Elements tab, right-click it and choose Capture Screenshot. If that feels fiddly, File then Export as PDF captures the whole page too, and the text stays selectable.
On an iPhone or iPad, take an ordinary screenshot, tap the preview in the corner, and switch from Screen to Full Page. It saves as a PDF.
What breaks, and why your capture may look wrong
Full-page capture is not perfect, and the failures are consistent across browsers.
- Lazy-loaded images. Many sites only load an image when you scroll near it. If you capture without scrolling first, those images come out blank. Scroll to the bottom, wait for everything to appear, then scroll back up and capture.
- Sticky headers and floating buttons. An element pinned to the top of the screen can repeat down the capture, or cover content.
- Cookie banners and pop-ups. They are part of the page, so they end up in the picture. Dismiss them first.
- Very long pages. Browsers have a height limit, and a page tens of thousands of pixels tall can be cut off or rendered blank at the bottom.
- Anything behind a login. The capture only shows what the browser is showing, so a member area needs you signed in.
Capturing a page without installing anything
If you are on someone else's computer, or you want the capture to come from a clean browser with no extensions or logged-in state, you can paste a URL into our free tool. It loads the page in a real browser, captures the whole height, and gives you the image plus an offline copy of the page to download. Nothing is installed and no account is needed.
When a manual screenshot is the wrong tool
A screenshot is a picture. It is excellent for proving what a page looked like on a given day, and useless for getting the text and images back out. If you want the content, you want the page saved as HTML with its images, which is a different job.
The other problem is that a manual capture only exists if you remember to take one. Most people who need a screenshot of their own site need it because something already went wrong, and the only capture they have is months old or was never taken.
That is the case for capturing on a schedule. We save every public page of a site as HTML, capture a full-page screenshot of each one, and email a private link once a month, so the picture of any given month already exists when you need it. How that works, and what is in a backup.
Squarespace doesn't give you a copy of your site. We do: every public page, full-page screenshots, images and fonts, in your inbox on the 1st.
Back up my site free