Download an entire website into one .zip
Site Downloader is a free Chrome extension that turns the tab you are on into a starting point, follows the internal links from there, and saves the result as a single archive you can browse with the Wi-Fi switched off.
.zip to your Downloads folder.Depth is the only setting you have to think about.
Everything else about the crawl is decided for you, on purpose.
Most full website downloaders hand you twenty checkboxes and a filter syntax. This one has a number with a minus and a plus next to it. That number is link depth: how many hops away from your starting page the crawler is allowed to travel.
Before anything downloads, the popup counts the pages it found and shows you the total, so you are never guessing whether you asked for forty pages or four thousand. Cancel is available the whole time, and a cancelled job leaves nothing half-written on disk.
| Depth | What you get | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The page you are on, plus every internal page it links to | One docs section, a blog category, a product line |
| 2 | Those pages, plus everything they link to | A whole documentation site, a small blog |
| 3+ | Keeps expanding outward, level by level | A full site mirror. Check the page count first |
What it will not download.
The honest list. Every website downloader has one; most pages like this hide it.
- Anything behind your login. Assets are fetched with credentials omitted, so the crawler sees the site the way a logged-out visitor does. Your private dashboard will come back as a sign-in screen.
- Browser-internal pages.
chrome://URLs, the extensions page and the Web Store are off limits to every extension, so the toolbar icon simply stays disabled there. - Other domains. External links are skipped. That is what keeps a depth-3 crawl from wandering into the entire internet.
- Content that only exists after you interact. A page that loads its next batch of posts when you scroll arrives in the state it was in. Server-rendered HTML survives; an infinite feed does not.
- Video streams. Player embeds are kept as markup; the video itself is not pulled into the archive.
If the site you want is a JavaScript app that renders everything client-side, no downloader of this kind will give you a working copy. That is a limitation of the approach, not of this particular extension.
Compared with HTTrack, wget and the paste-a-URL services.
Four ways to download a whole website, and the trade-off each one makes.
| Tool | Setup | Sees what your browser sees | Trade-off |
|---|---|---|---|
| Site Downloader | One click, no config | Yes, it runs inside the tab | Depth control instead of fine-grained filters |
| HTTrack | Desktop install, wizard, filter rules | No, a separate HTTP client | Enormously configurable, and it feels like 2004 |
| wget --mirror | Terminal one-liner | No | Free and scriptable; blind to anything rendered by JS |
| Online downloaders | Paste a URL on someone's site | No | Nothing to install; a third party learns every URL you archive |
The full method-by-method walkthrough, with the commands, lives in the guide to downloading a website for offline use.
Questions people ask.
Can I really download an entire website for free?
Yes. Site Downloader is free from the Chrome Web Store, there is no account, no page cap and no paid tier waiting behind the first archive.
Can I download website files without installing anything?
Not with this one, which is a Chrome extension and therefore one install. Paste-a-URL services need nothing installed and charge you a log entry on somebody else's server instead.
How long does a full site download take?
It scales with page count and how fast the origin server answers. A hundred-page documentation site is usually a couple of minutes; the popup shows pages fetched against pages discovered while it runs, so you can watch the progress instead of guessing.
Will the offline copy still work without internet?
Yes. Links between the pages you downloaded are rewritten to point at local files, and stylesheets, scripts, images and fonts are stored alongside them. Open index.html from the unzipped folder and click around.
Does it respect robots.txt?
The extension fetches only what you point it at, in the same way your browser would. Whether a given site permits archiving is between you and that site's terms. See the note on responsible use in our privacy policy.
Can I download a website for offline viewing on a phone?
Not directly. This is a desktop Chrome extension. Download the archive on a computer, then move the unzipped folder to the device you want to read it on.
What is the biggest site it can handle?
There is no hard limit written into the extension, but memory is finite. Thousands of pages in one job is where things get slow; splitting a large site into two or three depth-2 crawls from different starting pages works better.
Related pages.
Download a whole site
before it changes.
Install the free extension and archive your first section in a couple of minutes.
Available in theChrome Web Store