Convert Website URL to PDF

How to save a webpage as a PDF — 3 steps

1. 1

   Enter the address

   Paste the URL of the page you want to keep. The page has to be fetched over the network, so this is the one step that leaves your machine.

2. 2

   Check how it paginates

   Look at where the content falls across pages before saving. Long pages and wide tables are where the result differs most from the browser view.

3. 3

   Download the PDF

   Save the document. What you get is a fixed record of the page as it was at that moment, readable without a browser or an internet connection.

Capturing a page before it changes

The strongest reason to save a page as a PDF is that web pages are not permanent. They are edited without notice, moved, paywalled, or taken down entirely, and link rot is severe enough that a substantial share of links in older documents no longer resolve. A PDF captured today is a fixed record of what the page said, and unlike a bookmark it does not depend on the site continuing to exist.

That makes it the practical answer for anything you may need to rely on later. Order confirmations, booking references, receipts, and account statements that a retailer keeps available for only a limited period. Terms and conditions or a policy page as it stood on the date you agreed to it. A published article or listing you may need to cite or reference. Evidence of what a site claimed at a particular time, which comes up in disputes far more often than people expect.

For that purpose the metadata around the capture is worth as much as the content. Note the date and the full URL — the best captures include them on the page itself, in a header or footer — because a page with no source or date is much weaker as a record. If the point is evidential, capture the whole page rather than a section, so nothing appears to have been selectively omitted.

Why the PDF does not look like the browser

A web page adapts to the window it is shown in; a PDF is a stack of fixed sheets. That single difference produces most of the discrepancies. Layouts built for a wide desktop viewport are rendered at the narrower width of a printed page, so multi-column designs collapse or overflow. Elements pinned with fixed positioning, which normally stay in place as you scroll, have no equivalent on a paginated surface and can repeat on every page. Page breaks land wherever the content happens to be, sometimes through the middle of an image or a table row.

The other source of difference is content that is not there at capture time. Anything loaded lazily as you scroll, revealed by clicking a tab or an accordion, or drawn by scripts after the initial load may be captured in its initial state — which is often empty or collapsed. Embedded video becomes a still frame or a blank area, since a PDF cannot play anything. Pages requiring a login cannot be fetched at all, because the request carries none of your session.

Some of this is worth knowing simply to set expectations, but two things help in practice. Many sites ship a print stylesheet that strips navigation, sidebars, and banners and widens the main content, and those sites produce noticeably cleaner PDFs. And links generally survive as clickable links in the output, which is useful — though it is worth remembering that they point back out to a live web that may not still have the page you were trying to preserve.

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