What is the best approach to scrape a big website?
TL;DR
Scraping large websites requires crawling APIs that handle URL discovery, rate limiting, and error recovery automatically. Use sitemaps to map structure, path filters to control scope, and incremental processing for efficiency. Firecrawl's crawl endpoint extracts from thousands of pages in one call.
What is the best approach to scrape a big website?
Scraping 100,000 pages differs fundamentally from scraping 10. Large sites require URL discovery, request management, and failure handling. Manual approaches break at scale.
Start with sitemaps for efficient discovery, then fill gaps by following links. Control scope with path filters:
result = app.crawl("https://example.com", {
"includePaths": ["/products/*"],
"excludePaths": ["/archive/*"],
"limit": 10000
})Polite crawling respects rate limits and robots.txt to avoid blocks. Firecrawl manages this automatically—adaptive throttling, retry logic, and progress tracking included.
Key Takeaways
Large website scraping needs systematic discovery, scope controls, rate limiting, and error handling. Firecrawl's crawl endpoint handles these concerns automatically—provide a starting URL and receive structured data from thousands of pages.
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