Discover how to download all links from website instantly

Trying to pull every single link off a website can feel like a Herculean task. Whether you're gearing up for a big site audit, planning a content migration, or just doing some competitive snooping, the manual approach is a non-starter.

That’s where specialized tools come in. They take what could be hours of tedious, error-prone work and automate it completely.

A Straightforward Path to Link Extraction

When you need a complete sitemap or a list of every URL, accuracy and speed are what matter most. Let's be honest, nobody has the time to manually copy and paste hundreds or thousands of links. You're bound to miss some, and it's a surefire way to lose an entire afternoon.

On the other end of the spectrum, you could write a custom script. While powerful, that requires coding skills that many marketers, SEOs, and researchers just don't have—or don't have the time to apply.

This is why a simple browser extension is often the perfect middle ground. A tool like the Website Downloader for Chrome acts like a tiny, focused robot. You point it at a website, and it systematically crawls from page to page, gathering every link it finds and handing you a clean, organized list.

Why You Should Automate This

The biggest win here is pure efficiency. You kick off the crawl and then get back to work that actually requires your brain. The process is incredibly simple:

• Install the extension: A single click from the Chrome Web Store gets you started.
• Pick your target: Tell it which website you want to scan by entering the starting URL.
• Let it run: The tool does all the heavy lifting, navigating the site on its own.
• Grab your data: Once it's done, you can download a complete list of every URL found.

This infographic breaks down the core benefits of letting a tool handle the link extraction process for you.

As you can see, it turns a daunting project into a quick, automated, and manageable task. Before we get into the step-by-step specifics, let's quickly compare the different ways you could approach this.

Link Extraction Methods at a Glance

There's more than one way to get this job done, and the best method really depends on your technical comfort level and the scale of your project. Here’s a quick comparison to help you choose the right path.

| Method | Ease of Use | Technical Skill Required | Best For | | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | | Manual Copy/Paste | Very Easy | None | Tiny websites (fewer than 10 pages) or extracting links from a single page. | | Browser Extension | Easy | Minimal | Quickly crawling small to medium-sized sites directly from your browser. | | Desktop Crawler | Moderate | Basic to Intermediate | Deep, comprehensive site audits, SEO analysis, and large-scale projects. | | Custom Script (Python) | Difficult | Advanced | Highly customized crawls, complex data extraction, and recurring automated tasks. |

For most everyday tasks like quick audits or content inventories, a browser extension hits that sweet spot of being powerful enough without being overly complicated. It gives you the data you need without the steep learning curve.

Why Bother Downloading All a Website's Links?

So, why would you even need to grab every single link from a website? It might sound like a purely technical task, but in reality, it's a strategic move that gives you a massive advantage in a ton of different professional fields. When you download all links from a website, you’re essentially creating a complete architectural blueprint of that site.

For anyone in the SEO world, this blueprint is gold. It’s the starting point for any serious site audit. With a full list of URLs, you can systematically check your internal linking, spot those forgotten "orphaned" pages that Google can't find, and quickly hunt down broken links that kill user experience and tank your search rankings.

It's All About Data-Driven Decisions

This isn't just for SEO, though. It's a game-changer for competitive analysis. Imagine being able to map out a competitor’s entire website. You can see their content strategy laid bare—what topics they focus on, how they structure their information, and where the gaps are. That's powerful intel for creating content that fills those gaps and outperforms them.

Data analysts and researchers also depend on this. Extracting all links is often the first step in gathering huge datasets for market research. That list of URLs becomes the foundation for scraping product details, pricing information, or public records, effectively turning an unstructured website into a clean, organized source of data.

The need for this kind of information is exploding. The global web scraping market, which is all about pulling data from websites, hit about $1.03 billion in 2025. Projections show it could double by 2030, largely because of the huge demand for data to train AI and power e-commerce. In fact, something like 65% of global enterprises are already using data extraction tools to stay ahead. You can dig into more of these web crawling industry benchmarks on Thunderbit.

Key Takeaway: Getting a complete list of a website's links gives you a rich dataset that’s essential for any deep analysis—whether you're doing a technical SEO audit, spying on the competition, or conducting academic research.

Real-World Scenarios Where This Is a Lifesaver

Knowing the "why" makes the process so much more meaningful. Once you have that complete list of URLs, a whole world of possibilities opens up.

Think about these practical situations:

• Website Migrations: Moving a site to a new domain or a new CMS is a nightmare without a full URL list. It's your master checklist to make sure every single page is accounted for, properly redirected, and no content gets lost in the digital move.
• Content Archiving: Journalists, researchers, and archivists do this all the time. They extract links to create a permanent snapshot of a website at a particular moment, preserving information that could otherwise be updated or deleted forever.
• Building Niche Databases: A developer or even a dedicated hobbyist might download all the links from a specific site to build a curated database. This could be anything from a directory of scientific papers to a catalog of open-source software projects.

In each case, a simple list of links becomes an incredibly powerful tool. It takes the abstract structure of a website and turns it into a concrete, usable dataset—a skill that's becoming more critical every day.

If you’d rather not get your hands dirty with code, a browser extension is by far the easiest way to download all links from a website. It turns what sounds like a really technical job into a few simple clicks. This approach is perfect for anyone, from SEOs doing a quick audit to researchers gathering data, because it works right inside the tool you're already using—your web browser.

You can skip the learning curve that comes with command-line tools or the cost of dedicated desktop software. Within minutes, you can have an extension installed and ready to go. For this walkthrough, we'll be using the Website Downloader extension for Chrome, which was built specifically for this kind of task.

Getting Started with Website Downloader

First things first, you need to add the extension to Chrome. It’s a one-click install directly from the Chrome Web Store, just like adding an app to your phone. No complicated setup required.

You can find the official store page for the Website Downloader extension right here:

Once it's installed, you’ll see a new icon pop up in your browser's toolbar. That little icon is your gateway to pulling links from any site you visit. Just head over to the website you want to analyze, click the icon, and its control panel will open up. This is command central for your link-gathering mission, designed to be straightforward without throwing a bunch of confusing options at you.

Configuring Your Link Crawl

Before you hit "go," you need to tell the tool exactly what to look for. Think of it like giving a research assistant instructions. If your instructions are too broad, you’ll get a mountain of irrelevant links; too narrow, and you’ll miss what you came for.

The Website Downloader gives you a few key settings to dial in:

• Crawl Scope: This is the big one. Are you interested in links from the single page you're on, or do you need to scan the entire website?
• Crawl Depth: This tells the tool how many "clicks" deep to travel from your starting page. A depth of 1 grabs links only on the current page, while a higher number will make it follow links from that page to other pages, and then from those pages, and so on.
• Request Delays: It’s good practice to set a small delay between each request (a few hundred milliseconds is usually fine). This is just being polite to the website's server. It prevents you from hammering the site with rapid-fire requests, which could get your IP address temporarily blocked.

Pro Tip: I almost always start with a shallow crawl depth, maybe 2 or 3, especially for a site-wide audit. This usually gets you the most important pages without generating a massive list of thousands of URLs to sift through. You can always go back and run a deeper, more targeted crawl later if you need to.

Taking a moment to tweak these settings makes the whole process faster and gives you much cleaner data. For instance, if you only care about a site's blog posts, you could start the crawl on the main blog page and configure the tool to stay within that section of the site. This kind of targeted approach is a huge time-saver.

And once you have your list of URLs, you might want to do something with them. For more on that, you can see our guide that explains how to download a URL as a file, which is a great next step.

What to Do With Your List of Links

Alright, so the Website Downloader extension has done its job and scraped a whole bunch of URLs from your target site. What you have now is the raw material, a complete inventory of every link the crawler could find. Before you can really put this information to work, you'll need to sort through it and get it into a usable format.

Inside the extension, you get your first look at everything it discovered.

I always recommend taking a minute to just scroll through this initial list. It’s a great way to do a quick sanity check and see if the crawl went as planned. You can immediately get a feel for the site's structure and make sure the important sections were included before you even think about exporting.

Filtering the Noise to Find What Matters

Let's be honest, a raw list of every single URL is usually more noise than signal. You've got links to pages, images, CSS files, JavaScript, PDFs—you name it. The real magic happens when you start filtering this data to isolate exactly what you need for your specific task.

For example, if I'm doing an SEO audit, my primary focus is hunting for broken internal links, so I’ll filter for HTML pages on the same domain. But if I’m working with a content team, I might be looking for all the PDF case studies to see which ones are outdated. The goal dictates the filter.

The Website Downloader's interface makes this pretty straightforward. You can apply filters directly to the results to clean things up.

• Internal vs. External: I often start by separating links that stay on the site from those pointing elsewhere. This is essential for auditing your external linking strategy or just finding out who you're linking to.
• File Types: Need to inventory all the downloadable assets? You can zero in on specific file extensions like .pdf, .docx, or .jpg. For more on this, check out our guide on how to download files from a URL, which gets into more advanced methods.
• Subdomains: When you're dealing with a massive site that has separate subdomains (like blog.example.com and shop.example.com), filtering by subdomain is a lifesaver for understanding how these different properties are connected.

Think of filtering as asking your data a specific question. Before you export, stop and ask yourself, "What am I actually trying to accomplish here?" That will tell you exactly which links to keep and which to discard.

Exporting Your Links for Real-World Use

Once you've filtered your list down to just the good stuff, it's time to export. This is the step that takes your data out of the extension and into a format that other tools can actually work with. The ability to download all links from a website into a clean, structured file is what makes this whole process so powerful.

The Website Downloader gives you a couple of solid, universal format options, so your data will play nicely with pretty much any software.

| File Format | Best Use Case | My Go-To Tools | | :--- | :--- | :--- | | CSV | Perfect for general analysis. It’s the standard for spreadsheets and easily imports into most data tools. | Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets | | JSON | This one's for the developers. It's ideal for programmatic work or feeding the data into custom scripts. | VS Code, Python scripts |

For most marketing, SEO, or content projects, CSV is your best bet. Once you open that file in Google Sheets or Excel, the real work can begin. You can sort the data, add notes, and track your progress as you fix broken links or map out a content migration. This exported file is no longer just a list of links—it's your action plan.

Going Deeper: Advanced Link Extraction Methods

While a good browser extension gets the job done for most day-to-day tasks, some projects just demand more power. If you’re dealing with a massive website, need to set up automated, recurring crawls, or want to feed link data directly into another application, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and look at code-based solutions.

This approach means trading the point-and-click simplicity of an extension for near-limitless flexibility and scale.

We won't be diving into a full coding tutorial here, but I want to give you a clear picture of what's possible. For anyone with a bit of technical know-how, writing your own scripts gives you complete control over every aspect of the link extraction process.

Why Python Is the Go-To for Web Scraping

When it comes to web scraping, Python is the undisputed champion. It has an incredible ecosystem of powerful, open-source libraries built specifically for crawling sites and making sense of their content.

The numbers don't lie. According to the latest web scraping trends and statistics, Python is the language of choice for nearly 70% of developers building these kinds of tools. It’s accessible, well-documented, and a properly built scraper can hit a success rate of over 99%.

If you're looking to get started, there are two libraries you'll hear about constantly:

• BeautifulSoup: This is a fantastic tool for parsing HTML and XML. Think of it as your scalpel. Once you have the content of a page, BeautifulSoup helps you slice and dice it to pull out exactly what you need, like all the <a> tags.
• Scrapy: This isn't just a library; it's a complete framework. Scrapy handles the entire crawling process—making requests, following links from page to page, and processing the data it finds. It’s what you reach for when you're tackling a huge, complex site.

A custom script really shines when you need to handle tricky JavaScript-heavy websites, run crawls on a schedule (like checking competitor prices every morning), or plug the extracted links directly into a database or another automated workflow.

Finding the Right Tool for the Job

So, how do you choose? It really boils down to a simple trade-off between convenience and control.

An extension like the Website Downloader is perfect for quick, one-off tasks where you just need to get the links and get on with your day. A custom Python script, on the other hand, is the professional's choice for complex, repeatable, and large-scale projects.

If your work involves a deeper analysis of a site's architecture, you might also find our guide on https://websitedownloader.dev/blog/how-to-clone-a-website useful for offline examination. Knowing what both a simple extension and a powerful script can do ensures you’ll always have the perfect tool for any link-gathering challenge that comes your way.

Got Questions About Downloading Website Links?

Even with the best tools in your arsenal, diving into a link-downloading project can bring up a few questions. It’s always smart to think through the practical and ethical sides of what you’re doing before you kick off a big crawl. Let's walk through some of the things people ask me most often.

Probably the first question on everyone's mind is, "Is this even legal?" For the most part, yes. Downloading links from publicly available webpages is generally fine. Think of it this way: you're just collecting information that the website is already showing to any visitor.

The real key here is to be a good internet citizen. Before you start, take a peek at the site's robots.txt file and its terms of service. Your goal is to collect links, not personal data or copyrighted material. And definitely don't hammer their server with a million requests a second—that’s a quick way to get yourself blocked.

What About Logins and Tricky Modern Websites?

So, what happens when you need to get links from a page that’s behind a login? Good news—it’s totally possible.

An extension like the Website Downloader runs right inside your browser. Since you're already logged in, the extension can see everything you can see. It just piggybacks on your authenticated session to crawl those members-only pages. Just be sure you have permission to be there and aren't breaking any rules.

The real headaches usually come from the technology itself. I've seen people get stuck on:

• JavaScript-heavy sites: Modern websites often build themselves on the fly as you scroll. A basic scraper might only grab the initial HTML and miss all the juicy links that load in later.
• Anti-scraping tech: Some websites are actively looking for crawlers and will shut you down if you’re too aggressive. If your requests are too fast or look automated, you’ll hit a wall.

To get around these, you need a tool that can actually execute JavaScript, just like a real browser. It’s also a good practice to build a polite delay between your requests to mimic human behavior.

How Data Extraction is Changing

The world of data extraction has changed a lot over the years. It used to be all about SEO audits and checking a competitor’s sitemap. Now, the game has expanded.

These days, the focus has shifted to much more dynamic platforms. Video and social media sites are huge targets for scraping multimedia content and spotting trends. This kind of data is gold for training AI models, which just shows how much the field has grown.

I saw a recent analysis showing that TikTok has actually overtaken Google as the most-scraped website. That really puts into perspective how important video and social data have become for everything from market research to feeding the next generation of AI.

This shift really drives home how valuable this skill set is. What was once a niche task for SEOs is now a core competency for anyone who works with online information. Knowing the ins and outs lets you get the data you need, the right way.

Ready to make your own link gathering a whole lot easier? The Feedforward Software Website Downloader is a no-nonsense Chrome extension that does the heavy lifting for you. Grab it from the Chrome Web Store and turn a tedious job into a few quick clicks.