Website Screenshot: capture any URL as PNG or JPG
Free in-browser website screenshot tool. Capture any public URL as PNG or JPG at desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile viewport. Powered by microlink.io's headless-browser API — 50 free screenshots per day per IP, no API key required.
When to use an online website screenshot tool
Bug reports
Capture an exact pixel-perfect render of a buggy page on a clean, anonymous browser — no cookies, no extensions, no logged-in state.
Mobile vs desktop QA
Compare how your site looks on iPhone, iPad, laptop and 1920px desktop in a single click using the device chip presets.
PDF archives
Render any page to PDF with selectable text for legal evidence, compliance archives or article snapshots — via the microlink backend.
Blog & deck assets
Grab clean hero shots of competitor sites, landing pages or your own product for blog posts, slide decks and case studies.
Open Graph previews
Snap the live page as an OG image when your CMS hasn't generated one yet — desktop viewport, full page.
Historical snapshots
Use the Wayback button to instantly jump to the archived version of any URL — useful for finding deleted content or comparing changes.
How to use the website screenshot tool
Enter any public URL
Type or paste a URL. Login-walled and IP-allow-listed pages won't work — the headless browser opens as a fresh anonymous visitor.
Pick viewport, format, mode
Choose desktop / laptop / iPad / iPhone resolutions, PNG / JPG / PDF output, and viewport-only vs full-page scroll capture.
Optionally pick a backend
Auto tries microlink, thum.io and WordPress mShots in order — combined free quota of ~1000+ shots / day. Or force one specific backend.
Capture & download
Click Capture; the image appears in seconds. Click Download for the file or Copy image URL for embedding.
About website screenshot APIs and how this tool works
Generating a website screenshot from a URL requires a real headless browser (Chromium or WebKit) running on a server — it has to fetch the page, execute JavaScript, wait for fonts to load and finally paint to a buffer that can be exported as PNG, JPG or PDF. Doing that in your own browser would mean running an entire browser inside a browser, which is impractical. So this tool aggregates the three best free public headless-browser APIs and falls back through them automatically.
The three backends
microlink.io is the most capable — full viewport / fullPage mode, PDF export, colorScheme override, custom wait times. Free tier is 50 requests / day / IP. thum.io uses path-modifier URLs (/get/width/W/crop/H/fullpage/png/{url}), free 1000 shots / month, fast and reliable. WordPress mShots (the engine WordPress.com uses for site thumbnails) has no documented limit, returns a low-res placeholder on the first call and the real shot a few seconds later. Running them in auto mode multiplies your daily quota.
Viewport vs full-page
Viewport captures exactly what fits in the device window — same as your monitor when you visit the page. Full-page scrolls the page top-to-bottom and stitches everything into one tall image. Long pages can produce 6–10 MB PNG files; switch to JPG for smaller archives.
Device viewports
The viewport selector includes real iPhone / iPad / laptop / 4K resolutions. Behind the scenes each request sets the headless browser's window size before navigating — that triggers your responsive CSS so you get the actual mobile or tablet layout, not the desktop layout shrunken down.
PDF export
The microlink backend can render the page as a real PDF (selectable text, vector graphics, scalable) instead of a raster image. The preview embed will display the PDF inline; the Download button saves the original. Useful for legal evidence and compliance archives where rasterised screenshots may not be admissible.
What you can't capture
Anything that requires a login, an IP allow-list, a CAPTCHA, or a payment wall. Pages behind Cloudflare Bot Fight at the strictest tier may also block headless browsers entirely. For login-walled pages, run your browser's Save as PDF or use a browser extension.
Wayback Machine
The Wayback button opens https://web.archive.org/web/2/<your URL> in a new tab, which redirects to the most recent archived snapshot — instantly giving you a historical view of any page, going back to ~1996 for the oldest URLs.
Website Screenshot — frequently asked questions
The tool calls the public api.microlink.io endpoint which spins up a headless browser, loads the URL and returns a screenshot. The image URL points to microlink's CDN; we download it client-side so you can save it.
The free microlink endpoint allows 50 screenshots per day per IP. For higher volume, microlink offers paid plans with API keys.
No. The headless browser opens the URL as a fresh anonymous visitor — anything behind a login wall returns the login page.