Once a year or so, I spend some time trying to find the best way to take a seamless screenshot of an entire website, as I’m not always a fan of the CTRL + S approach for saving a site’s data. I only wish I knew earlier how absurdly easy this was to do on iOS, of all places.
I’ve tried plenty of browser extensions that worked to varying degrees (until I found the reason why most of them would typically mess up for me). Capturing the entirety of a site on my iPhone now opens up plenty of new possibilities though—including being particularly convenient if I want to send someone a snapshot of what a site looks like at the exact moment I’m viewing it or want to show someone how a bug is mucking up my experience.
Whatever the reason, capturing a full-page screenshot of a website on iOS is simple. To start, launch the website in your device’s Safari browser—after you’ve made sure you’re using the latest version of iOS. Take a screenshot of a website as you normally would—Side Button + Volume Up, in my case. You’ll now see this screen:
G/O Media may get a commission
If you don’t see those two options at the top—Screen and Full Page—iOS is probably being fussy. Close Safari, reopen it, and try taking another screenshot. These options are critical, as tapping Full Page is the magic sauce that will lead you to this screen:
That little sidebar on the right, which you can scroll through up and down, shows you the entirety of the page that your phone has captured. When you go to save it, however, you won’t be dropping it in your photo album because your device isn’t technically creating a giant photograph. Instead, your iPhone will have converted this mega-screenshot into a PDF, so you’ll need to send it to some other folder on your device:
And that’s it. You now have a gigantic, full-page screenshot of whatever website you were looking at—one that’s already been converted into a PDF for you. If you’re doing a lot of archiving of old work, I would argue this is almost easier to deal with than the combination of a desktop browser and an extension, but that’s just me.