Introduction

There are many reasons why you might want to extract data from a specific public website. Maybe your sales team needs a list of potential clients listed on a massive online directory, or you want to scrape a real estate directory to make sure you’re one step ahead of competitors.

But how can you turn any website into an API? Visualping.

Before running a job, Visualping’s API lets you select the specific data on the page you want extracted. You can schedule jobs on demand, and even customize your scraping with advanced features – like only extracting data with target keywords.

Use Visualping’s webhook to integrate automatic data alerts in any third-party application, or send a request to the API directly, to retrieve data that way.

In this post, we’ll briefly cover what a web scraping API is, why you would want to turn a website into an API in the first place, and then the best way to turn any website into an API – with Visualping, a simple yet powerful web scraping solution that can turn any website into an API.

What is a Web Scraping API?

In order to turn a website into an API, you first need a web scraper.

A web scraper is a tool that automates the process of extracting data from websites, in the form of HTML code, and converts it into a usable structured format – either in a spreadsheet, like with Visualping’s Google Sheets integration, or in an API.

An API is a set of definitions and protocols for building and integrating application software. It is the connection between your device, and everything that’s delivered to it, when you want it. The data can be pulled on an automated schedule, such as through a webhook, or manually, on demand.

Why Turn a Website into an API?

There’s a lot of different reasons why you’d want to turn a website into an API. Doing so allows businesses and individuals to pull data from certain web pages of interest in order to analyze it for actionable insights, such as making informed investing decisions or generating competitive intelligence.

You may also want to turn a website into an API in order to develop other applications that will use that same data – such as simplifying the process of powering your own apps and services with valuable website data. Web scraping APIs provide a seamless way to integrate scrapers into existing systems, making the data retrieval process customized to your needs.

Without a web scraping API, the research and data extraction process would be time-consuming and costly. You would struggle to obtain accurate and up-to-date data from the web page of interest, leading to uninformed decisions and missed opportunities.

How to Turn Any Website Into an API – with Visualping

Visualping is the best way to turn a website into an API. Unlike other web scraper APIs, it can crawl any website on the internet for data – the options for web pages you can scrape are endless.

You can find our full API documentation here.

Use the API to create your own website change detection solutions, such as getting automated notifications in any third-party application with Visualping’s webhook. You can also send a request to the API by providing the URL and HTTP method, in which case Visualping will process the request and send the response from the web server.

Use the Visualping API to create your own website change detection solutions, such as your own app, either for your team, or others. You can also scrape pages on demand, schedule jobs, and modify the settings with advanced features that help you tailor your data to exactly what you care about.

Check it out.

More signal, less noise, with advanced scraping features

Before the job is run, Visualping allows you to select the specific data on the page you care about. By being able to focus on specific page areas, Visualping lets you only extract the data that’s most relevant to you.

For example, you may want to turn a web page into an API to keep track of Best Buy’s price changes – but you’re not interested in the product reviews. By selecting the area of the page with the price, Visualping will only scrape price changes over time.

The Visualping API also offers other advanced features, such as allowing you to scrape data with only target keywords of interest.

Access Visualping’s full API documentation here.

Seamless Implementation with custom support packages

The Visualping API is flexible and supports embedding into your own product or service – whether for your team, or for others to use. Implementation is easy with its well-documented API, as well as flexible support packages to guarantee you get the support you need.

Stay in the Know with website change monitoring

As well as one of the best web scraping tools, Visualping is also a website change monitoring tool that can monitor web page changes online and send you alerts when there’s an update – via email, email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Webhooks and other integrations like Zapier.

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The scraper can also automatically record website data in your spreadsheet, with its Google Sheets integration, such as the below example of a raw data feed of press releases by DJ 30 companies.

<center>Visualping example of DJ 30 press releases, automatically integrated into Google Sheets.</center>

Conclusion

There’s a lot of different reasons why you may want to turn a website into an API. Web scraping API tools are required to efficiently make this data available in a form that’s consumable by your application.

To efficiently make website data available in a form that’s consumable by your application, you need a web scraping API.

Visualping is the best web scraper for turning any website into an API. Select specific page areas to only extract the data you care about. Use its webhook to integrate data alerts in any third-party application, or send a request to the API directly to retrieve the data from any URL.

Interested in learning more about the Visualping API, and how we can assist you or your team with data extraction? Contact us today, we’d be happy to help.