Surely more than once you thought about a way to download a full website to navigate through it without being connected to the Internet. Surely something very useful when you expect to be offline for some time, like when you go on a trip somewhere without signal, or when you go through a path with an unreliable data coverage or unstable WiFi connection and you would like to browse a particular site as if you were online.
It is true that modern browsers can download the different pages of the same site in HTML format for viewing offline, but it limits the power to navigate to other options, menus or content, since the links are lost and keep on pointing to the online version. This way you only download the page on which you clicked Save as Webpage.
To prevent this from happening, you should download all pages in HTML, although this way, the links will not work either as when you are online, that is, although you can see all downloaded pages offline, you will be unable to follow the links on each of them. Therefore, the solution is to download the full web, or at least all the files needed to navigate as you do when you have an Internet connection.
But, how do you do that?. Well, there’s some applications to make this process simple, like the ones we’ll show you now, that are capable of downloading the files necessary from a website so that you can then visit and navigate it offline, but with complete links and images as in the online version.
One is WinHTTrack, it is compatible with Windows XP, 2000, Vista, 7, 8 and Windows 10, free, portable and very easy to use. It has a simple interface, from which you can make a fair number of adjustments to set up our downloads. Basically, by entering the url of the website you want to download, WinHTTrack begins downloading all files, links and structures related to the original site and saves it on a local directory where you can then access it as if you were connected to the site.
Of course, being a local copy, changes or updates that are subsequently added to the site online will not show for us. It is recommended to make this type of download when you are connected to a WiFi network and have enough storage space, although you can always free some space whenever you want.