THE 8 BEST Websites to Practice Web Scraping

Although legal, web scraping puts a load on a website’s server. This is why it is important, when practicing web scraping, to use find a playground for improving your scraping techniques.

In this tutorial, I will show you the websites that I like best when practicing web scraping.

Here is a list of websites to practice web scraping:

1. scrapethissite.com
2. crawler-test.com
3. Httpbin.org
4. the-internet.herokuapp.com
5. toscrape.com: books.toscrape.com & quotes.toscrape.com
6. JSON Placeholder
7. realpython.github.io/fake-jobs
8. s1.demo.opensourcecms.com/wordpress

1. ScrapeThisSite (scrapethissite.com)

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ScrapeThisSite stands out because it provides a well-structured collection of websites with some web scraping challenges. You can navigate through different categories and scrape varying types. The website is both simple and rich.

2. Crawler-Test (crawler-test.com)

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Crawler-test.com really is a gem for web scraping, but also for SEO learning. A strong infrastructure was built to investigate how bots would handle various types of errors that could happen on a website.

3. Httpbin

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Httpbin.org is not a website built for web scraping in itself. That is, a lot of the web scraping challenge is to handle various status codes and HTTP responses. Httpbin offers a lot of example endpoints to test how your code would react in different scenarios such as 500 errors, redirects or authentication, among many other things. A must have in your web scraping toolkit.

4. the-internet.herokuapp.com

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The-Internet offers a wide range of web interactions, including multiple scenarios relevant to web scraping. Its user interface challenges will help beginner as well as expert web scrapers understand and manipulate HTML structures effectively.

5. To Scrape (toscrape.com)

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Toscrape.com offers an incredibly simple interface to scrape quotes (quotes.toscrape.com) or scrape books (books.toscrape.com), including pagination exercises. This is the perfect beginner web scraping sandbox.

6. {JSON} Placeholder

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JSON Placeholder is another website that is not really meant for web scraping, but is useful to brush up some of the skills that web scrapers must have. I am talking about using APIs.

APIs are the best way to avoid web scraping, and should be use before any web scraping project. Thus learning how to interact with APIs is primordial to web scrapers. JSON Placehoder is a free fake API that you can use to practice various HTTP requests and inspect the API response.

Thus, JSON placeholder makes it into the list of websites to practice web scraping.

7. Real Python Fake Jobs (realpython.github.io/fake-jobs)

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Job boards are of a big interest for web scrapers. The job industry is massively populated by scraped content. In light of this, realpython.com created a super simple fake job board to help you practice web scraping for jobs: realpython.github.io/fake-jobs. Beginner web scraping sandbox.

8. Open Source CMS Demos (s1.demo.opensourcecms.com/wordpress)

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WordPress being such a widely used CMS, it is useful to practice web scraping on some websites built on it, which is why this sandbox was added to the list. There is however, very limited things to practice on opensourcecms.com.

Conclusion

Mastering web scraping requires practice. The websites mentioned in this article offer great opportunities to improve your skills. Crawler-Test, ScrapeThisSite and The-Internet stand out as best options due to their dedicated focus on web scraping challenges. Explore these platforms, experiment with different scraping scenarios, and watch your expertise in web scraping flourish.