How to screenshot an entire webpage

A normal screenshot captures your screen. A full-page screenshot captures the whole document — including everything below the fold, however far you would have to scroll to reach it. There are three ways to get one, and the right choice depends on how often you need to do it.

Method 1: Chrome DevTools, no extension

Chrome can do this on its own, and most guides skip it. If you only need a full-page screenshot occasionally, this is the fastest path and installs nothing.

1. Open the page.
2. Open DevTools with F12, or Cmd+Option+I on macOS.
3. Open the command menu with Ctrl+Shift+P (Cmd+Shift+P on macOS).
4. Type screenshot and choose Capture full size screenshot.

Chrome saves a PNG of the entire page to your downloads folder.

Where it falls down

• Lazy-loaded images. Sites that load images as you scroll will often come out with grey placeholder boxes, because DevTools does not scroll the page first.
• Sticky headers. Depending on the page, a fixed navbar can end up floating over the middle of the image.
• No editing. You get a raw PNG. Any annotation or redaction is a separate job in another tool.
• Very long pages. Past a certain height the capture fails or is silently truncated.

Method 2: A full-page screenshot extension

An extension automates the part that makes this tedious: it scrolls the page, captures each screen, and joins the frames into one image. If you do this more than occasionally, this is the option that saves real time — and it is where the difficult cases get handled properly.

The mechanics are worth understanding, because they explain most bad results:

• Chrome limits screenshots to two per second. That cap exists at browser level and cannot be raised, so a page 20 screens tall takes a minimum of about ten seconds. Any tool promising an instant capture of a very long page is either scaling it down or skipping frames.
• Sticky elements have to be suppressed. A position: fixed navbar sits in every frame. It should appear on the first screen and be hidden for the rest.
• The last frame overlaps. You cannot scroll past the bottom of a page, so the final screen repeats part of the previous one. If the tool pastes it at a fixed offset instead of where the page actually landed, you get a duplicated band of content — the most common stitching artefact.
• Browsers cap image size. Around 32,767 pixels per side, and less on a high-DPI display where every CSS pixel becomes two. Beyond that the image has to be scaled down. A good tool tells you it did; a bad one hands you a blank PNG.

Method 3: Manual capture and stitching

Screenshot, scroll, screenshot, repeat — then align and merge the pieces in an image editor. It works anywhere, needs nothing installed, and is the only option on pages where the other two methods fail.

It is also slow and the seams usually show, because scrolling by hand rarely moves exactly one viewport. Worth knowing as a fallback; not worth doing twice.

Which should you use?

• Once in a while, no editing needed — DevTools. It is already installed.
• Regularly, or you need to annotate and redact — an extension.
• A page where both fail — manual stitching, once, carefully.

How FullPageSS handles it

FullPageSS is built around the failure modes above. It hides sticky headers after the first screen, waits for lazy-loaded images, places every frame at the position the page actually reached rather than an assumed offset, and tells you when a page is too tall to capture at full resolution instead of quietly degrading it.

Screenshots stay on your device, and the editor has the annotation and blur tools you would otherwise open a second app for. There is a free plan with ten full-page captures a day.