Websites to Practice Web Scraping

We opened every site below on October 23, 2026; all were online.

Books to Scrape and Quotes to Scrape describe themselves as "a safe place for beginners learning web scraping and for developers validating their scraping technologies" (toscrape.com). Scrape This Site calls itself "a public sandbox for learning web scraping" (scrapethissite.com).

A fictional bookstore with 1,000 books across 50 pages, 20 per page, and no JavaScript. It teaches the core loop of every scraper: fetch a list page, extract items, follow "next", visit detail pages for more fields. Good exercises:

1. Collect title, price and star rating from page 1.
2. Follow the "next" link until all 50 pages are done (1,000 rows).
3. Open each book's page for UPC, stock count and description.
4. Group by category and save to CSV.

A complete version in Requests and Beautiful Soup, and the same job in Scrapy, are in Scrapy vs BeautifulSoup vs Selenium vs Playwright; in our test both collected all 1,000 books.

The same quotes appear in 8 versions, each with a new difficulty (toscrape.com):

The scroll version is the best practice target for hidden APIs: the quotes you see are fetched from a JSON endpoint you can call directly, page by page, with no HTML parsing (how to scrape hidden APIs and embedded JSON). The JavaScript version shows why a plain HTML parser finds nothing on some pages (Cheerio vs Puppeteer), and the login version is practice for sessions and cookies.

Scrape This Site groups its lessons by difficulty: start with the countries page, move to the hockey table with search forms and pagination, then the films page that loads data with AJAX, frames, and finally the "advanced" lesson on spoofing headers, handling logins and session cookies, and finding CSRF tokens. Its robots.txt disallows only /lessons/ and /faq/, so the sandbox pages under /pages/ are not disallowed.

The Internet was built for testing browser automation, so it suits Selenium, Playwright and Puppeteer practice: dynamic loading, infinite scroll, iFrames, shadow DOM, JavaScript alerts and file downloads, each on its own small page.

Not every scraping skill is about HTML. httpbin echoes back what it receives, which makes it the quickest way to see the headers your scraper sends, test retries against chosen status codes, and confirm that a proxy is in use: request https://httpbin.org/ip with and without the proxy and compare the IPs. JSONPlaceholder answers like a real REST API, which is practice for the JSON endpoints many sites load behind their pages.

Once the sandboxes feel easy, practice on real public data that site owners expect to be read by programs:

• Sites with official APIs or open data, such as Wikipedia, government open-data portals and public statistics offices: compare scraping a page with calling the API.
• Your own sites or a staging site you control: you can test speed and load safely.
• Small, static public pages, such as a club's event list or a public price list, collected slowly and for personal use.

Before scraping a real site, read its robots.txt and terms, stay with public data and keep the pace low; how to check if a website allows scraping walks through the checks. Project ideas built on these sites are in web scraping projects.

1. One static page: Fake Jobs or Books to Scrape page 1. Selectors, text cleanup, saving to CSV.
2. Pagination and detail pages: all 50 pages of Books to Scrape.
3. JSON and hidden APIs: Quotes to Scrape /scroll, JSONPlaceholder.
4. JavaScript-rendered content: Quotes to Scrape /js/ and /js-delayed/, Scrape This Site's AJAX lesson, in a headless browser.
5. Forms, logins and sessions: Quotes to Scrape /login, Scrape This Site's advanced lesson.
6. Crawling and scale: follow every link on Books to Scrape with a crawler, with concurrency and a polite delay (how to crawl a website).
7. Headers and proxies: httpbin, then a real site at low volume.

If you are choosing a language or tools for these exercises, see what you need to start web scraping and Python web scraping.

Practice sites are built to be scraped; real sites limit automated traffic. Once your scraper sends more than a few hundred requests to one real site, you meet rate limits, 429 responses and IP blocks, and you need rotating IPs. ProxyField gives every request a new IP, or a sticky session from 30 s to 36 h for logins, over HTTP, HTTPS or SOCKS5, with targeting by country, region (state) and city. Residential proxies cost $2.95/GB for 1 GB and fall to $1.95/GB from 1,000 GB, with no subscription; traffic never expires, and all purchases are final. Start with residential proxies and the Easy Trial: 1 GB for $2.95.