How to Make a PDF of an Entire Website
June 1, 2019 / Updated: July 5, 2022 / Lena Shore
Filed under: Ask Lena, Productivity, Web Development
You have a couple of ways to make a PDF from a website. Actually, there are more ways than that, but I will be outlining two.
- Adobe Acrobat Pro (not the free version) — Lots of professionals have this suite already and you won’t have to buy an extra software
- PDFmyURL — This is a paid service that has lots of features and might be perfect for your needs
If you have any of your own suggestions, please feel free to put them in the comments!
PDFmyURL
PDFmyURL contacted me about reviewing their product and gave me access so I could look around. And I must say that it is really easy to use and has some nice options. If you need to create PDFs of websites a lot, this is a good option.
The first thing you’ll do is go to their website at pdfmyurl.com. You can put in a URL of the page you want as a PDF and download one for free. They have lots of neat options you can choose from like page size, and adblocking. It does a really nice job of keeping your site looking the way it actually looks.
If you decide you’d like to pay for one of their plans you get some additional features like:
- Set options for page sizing, header & footer
- Save PDFs as separate pages and one single PDF.
- Remove their branding
- Watermark your PDFs
- Encrypt and protect your PDFs
- Convert HTML or URLs to PDF automatically with their HTML to PDF API
- Save an entire website to PDF at once in their members area or with their Batch API
Adobe Acrobat
One day you may need to print out an entire website or email it to someone to make notes. The old way was printing each page one by one and hoping you got all of the links. Yet, there is a better way if you use Adobe Acrobat Pro DC.
NOTE: This won’t work with the free Acrobat Reader. And Acrobat can’t make a PDF from a website that requires a login.
- First, fire up Adobe Acrobat and go to File –> Create –>PDF From Web Page. For older versions of Acrobat go to File –> Create PDF –> From Web Page.
- Then click, “Capture Multiple Levels,” and select, “Get entire site,” or choose the levels you want to grab. Example: Choosing 1 level will just get the top pages and no sub-pages.
- If you want, you can review the Settings area to print landscape and some other options. When you are ready, click, “Create”.
I tried Acrobat Pro and after about 500 MB it stopped and said “Out of Memory” which is ridiculous because I have 100’s of Gigabytes of space.
Hi David! Memory is the amount of power your computer has to allocate to functions or programs. Space is the amount of hard drive space you have to store files. They are both measured in MB and Gigabytes, which can be confusing. You may have plenty of space on your hard drive, but not enough power to complete the PDF.
As your machine runs throughout the day it allocates power to your different programs. Little bits here and there. Or maybe larger chunks for items that require more power/memory. When you quit those programs or they complete their function, it gives that memory back to the “pool of memory” so it can be used by another function. Programs you have running in the background or websites running on tabs you aren’t on can be using memory.
So, the first thing you want to do is make sure you aren’t using up extra memory. The easiest way to do this is to restart your computer. Don’t launch any programs you don’t need. If you have programs that launch automatically, go ahead and turn them off. Only run Acrobat.
Good luck!
Well I tried… and despite checking every box, it only looked at and created the homepage and a downloadable PDF link that was on it… it looked nothing like the homepage however since it didn’t download the actual images we used.
I already had the PDF downloaded of course so that bit was unnecessary – it was the HTML and all the links, images and text I needed.
All the other pages on the site were completely ignored – I ended up just clicking every link for hours and screenshotting it instead. The thing I was trying to avoid by using this.
oops – update – it did work. I was fooled the first time when the pdf came up so I thought it had finished so clicked on stop. The second time I let it run on without clicking on the Stop button and it’s worked
Thank you for this awesome content. Thanks for sharing.
As always you are a great teacher. Thanks for this!
As always you are a great teacher. Thanks for this!
Thanks to Glad you found it helpful!
I don’t see any options for making more than a single PDF from a website.
Is it possible if web site contains a lot of pdf, this process will download it as a separate pdf
If a PDF of a site turns out funky looking (missing images or rearranged) and you want a screen capture of the ENTIRE page try the “awesome screenshots” add-on. It saves the page as .jpg or .png right to your desktop with very decent resolution. Of course it does preserve the text as text or links since it is a raster file but very useful:
Thank you for your answers.
Thank you for the tip. When creating the multi-level PDF, is there a way to enter credentials for a website if it is password protected?
Not that I am aware of. Maybe if you entered the credentials first and then ran Acrobat?
Chris – I updated the article. I found a product that does password protect when it creates the PDF.
Thanks for the tip, very very helpful
Very Informative Blog … But I also tried https://pdfbeaver.com/webpage-url to convert webpage into PDF the results were satisfying.
What, can the be done! I never thought about this. Bythe way thanks for the tip.
for me it only gets the first page of the web, is there anything i can do? I PUT THE WEBSITE IM TRYING TO CONVERT IN WEBSITE
If you look at the second bullet in the article it explains how to grab more levels.
I followed the info from the “second bullet” but I too only got the first page. Tried it twice. So Paula and I both are not finding this very helpful without further info.
What version of the software are you using? Free or paid?
I too, am only getting the 1st page. My Adobe is the 2017 version, paid. Is it because I am trying to convert a magazine’s digital issue? If it should still be acceptable, how can I grab all pages?
There is a specific setting to tell it how deep to collect. Check that first. However, a digital magazine is usually a file type and not an HTML website. I suspect it won’t work. Sometimes magazines will let you download online magazines. Look for a link to download. If not, it may have some security to prevent it from being downloaded. That same security would prevent someone from copying the entire thing.
Thank you!! This is perfect. I had no idea Acrobat could do that. I like to keep visual copies of websites I do for clients so I can refer back to a page after major revisions. I’ve also had sites hacked that had to be rebuilt due to no or corrupt backups.
I have also had to rebuild client sites when the original designer is no longer around and it is impossible to get into the backend. Being able to have a visual copy will help make the “rebuild” a lot easier.
So thank you!
Glad you found it helpful! (:
How editable is the PDF document afterward? And how well does it convert into a docx doc after?
The PDF isn’t perfect. But, it’s good for proofing and marking up. You can edit as well as you can edit any other PDF. I don’t know anything about how it converts to Word. You’d have to try it and see.
Thanks for the reply. I haven’t seen a perfect tool for converting a whole site into a PDF yet. I think I am going to get a PRO subscription so I can do this. As long as it looks like the site and not a printable version of the site, and it’s editable, it will be something worth for me to look into.
It isn’t the print version of the site, but it isn’t always pretty. If you have SVG code for images it will skip those for instance. But, some older sites with all images look good.
Also, you can get a trial version of Adobe Acrobat to try it out.
Thanks for letting me know about the trial version! Great article by the way, very useful! 😀
Jenny, this is a feature that is only available in recent versions of Acrobat DC/2017, so your only option is to upgrade your Acrobat to the latest. Thank you so very much!!!! Really struggled with this until I found this post! Thanks!!!
Oh neat! I didn’t know about that feature of Adobe Acrobat.
If your website is on WordPress, you can also use the plugin Print My Blog (see https://wordpress.org/plugins/print-my-blog/) just set it to use pages instead of posts. It will omit content most people don’t want in a PDF, like menus and sidebars.
What a cool plugin! I didn’t know that “Print My Blog” existed. Thanks for the share. (:
Is it possible if web site contains a lot of pdf, this process will download it as a separate pdf
I don’t see any options for making more than a single PDF from a website.
If a PDF of a site turns out funky looking (missing images or rearranged) and you want a screen capture of the ENTIRE page try the “awesome screenshots” add-on. It saves the page as .jpg or .png right to your desktop with very decent resolution. Of course it does preserve the text as text or links since it is a raster file but very useful:
http://awesomescreenshot.com/
As always you are a great teacher. Thanks for this!