How to Download an Entire Website for Offline Browsing

Download and Copy an Entire Website with Winhttrack

How would you like to download and copy an entire website? Not just browsing it online, but instead, copying all of its contents and saving it to your computer. This way, you have a copy of the entire website even if you are offline! Winhttrack lets you copy and download an entire website! Its fast, easy to understand, and free.

Download and install Winhttrack from HTTrack Website Copier - Offline Browser

For a this demo of Winhttrack, I will download the static content of “hamsterhideout.com”. My younger sister loves hamsters, so I thought this would be be easier so she can browse while offline.


Input the project name (this will be the saved project file of winhttrack)
Input the base path (this is where the files will be saved on your computer.


Input the website address

Click on Set Options to review the download settings
The default settings of winhttrack are already enough to download websites. For demo purposes, we will go into the important options that can be tweaked to adjust the downloaded content.



Downloading rules

The default Max transfer rate is only at a slow 25kb. While this is slow, this is done so that httrack does not overload the website that you are copying with too fast and too many download requests. Some websites have it in them to delay/block too fast and too many download requests from a single viewer.

You can also adjust the mirroring depth. This is the limit on how deep from the main directory will winhttrack copy.



Include/exclude the download of certain file types

By default, winhttrack downloads all known static files such as pictures, videos and sound files. You can adjust these settings if you would like to include special filenames or exclude other types.



Website Copying in progress!

After setting your download options, Winhttrack goes into action and downloads the entire website to a folder in your hard drive. The download might take a while – depending on the total file size of the html and media files.



Browsing the offline copy

The screenshot above shows the downloaded website at it is saved from my computer. Winhttrack is mostly able to copy static content. Dynamic content such as php/forms/scripts, and ads are not copied. The code for dynamic content is preserved. This enables the offline copy to still display the dynamic content as the browser fetches them online.



All the downloaded files

This folder contains the winhttrack project file and all the downloaded website contents. You can save this folder on another computer for later offline browsing.



Winhttrack is a free, easy to use, and fast website copier. It is especially useful for copying site with static content like – picture galleries, text and documents, and web downloads. This is also a good tool for keeping track of your favorite website’s history.