How to make an offline copy of a website
There are a lot of tools that can be used to rip a site, in other words to make an offline copy of it, but what I focus in this article, is on the tools that I believe have a good level of workability and efficacity.
HTTrack Website Copier, is the most known of these tools, it is simple and easy to use, and the download configuration options are self-explanatory.
For most times, this tool does its job correctly, and the only reason that made me look elsewhere , is that I have faced a strange issue, where after downloading a website, and if you click on a page X, you end up getting page Y, so there was a mix-up in the page content.
HTTrack Website Copier, is free, and it works on Windows, Linux and macOS. For Linux and macOS it has a web interface that can be used, as for windows it is a desktop GUI application.
Cyotek WebCopy, only works under windows, it is a free tool, which is easy to use and configure, and which provides more details, on what it is doing, and what is happening then httrack. So you can check for errors, status, you can additionally build a sitemap…
Cyotek WebCopy is fast, the only issue that I have faced, is that it saved html files with an htm extension, instead of an html one, playing with project options provided an easy solution.
Sitesucker is a paid app, and is macOS only, it is intuitive, and very simple.
What differentiates Sitesucker from other apps, is that you can get a web view of a page, which is basically, getting the page as seen by the user, so the page after being rendered by the browser, and any dynamic content loaded. HTTrack and WebCopy do not have the ability to render dynamic content, so you might end up, with webpages that have some missing components.
