As of 2020, there are more than 2 Billion websites offering something or the other. Out of those, only a handful of them has achieved success by engaging visitors and gaining popularity overtime. As someone rightly said, the day a website goes on a consistent 3-month upward trend of returning visitors, victory is near! 

Q: So what's unique among such sites? 

A: Great engaging content. 

Without a doubt, the website's content remains the most crucial factor to pull a lot of traffic and ensure that you have returning visitors. Quite more than often, Webmasters extract relevant data through Web Scraping from multiple sources on the internet to offer a wide range of information on top of their own content. 

Here is a web scraping tutorial to help you understand on using Byteline's No-Code Platform to leverage the web's full potential and generate an informational widget for your site in less than a minute - without writing a line of code.

What is Web Scraping?

Web Scraping refers to the process of mining data from an external source (usually another website) and then exported in a format of your own choice. The process essentially involves a Web Scraper Tool (for instance, Byteline) through a text transfer protocol to crawl the source website's data, reformat it and integrate through a widget as an additional topping on a different webpage. 

Successful businesses use Web Scraping for several uses including the following:

1. News alert ticker
2. Weather update
3. Recent job postings of target companies
4. Price changes, comparisons and offers
5. Social media data extraction for market research
6. ..and several others.

Web Scraping can be done manually, however, a consistent manual task gets overwhelming even to scrape a small piece of data. On the other hand, while there are several automated Web Scraping tools available, Byteline offers a unique No-Code Web Scraping Platform requiring ZERO programming knowledge to operate and scrape data from a source of your choice. 

With Byteline, you get: 

1. an automated Web Scraping to crawl any arbitrary website and extract data
2. integrate in 2 simple steps without writing a line of code
3. easily configure data through an intuitive GUI 
4. scrape data from website to Excel, CSV, Airtable, Dropbox, Email and more
5. manage Page Scrolling and Pagination easily
6. super quick integration with different automation flow components.

Using Byteline Web Scraper Tool for a Webflow CMS

With the following two steps, you can easily scrape data from a source website through a straightforward UI and feed into your Webflow CMS. Not only that, Byteline also helps you scrape data from a website to Excel and CSV, which can further be consumed by Gmail, Box and several other services.

Prerequisites

• A valid Webflow account. 
• Activate a Byteline Web Scraping account. To start with, you may choose the Free Tier (offering 100 actions/month) or a plan as per your need here. 
• Identify the source site from which you intend to extract data. 

For this tutorial, we are taking an example of extracting job posts from Dice.com to be exported into a Webflow CMS. 

Step 1

a) After logging to your Byteline account, visit the Web Scraper section to start a New Scrape. Enter the URL of your source site, in this case, its https://www.dice.com/jobs?q=developer. 

Quick Tip: Ensure that you input the exact page URL consisting of the required data, instead of the home page URL 

After entering the URL, the source site's results show up with rendered data.

b) Select elements of your choice from the rendered data and assign them a name. As shown in the video, we selected the Job Title, Job Location and Job Description from the rendered data.

‍Step 2

a) Once elements are selected and assigned a name, click on Next to reach the Preview page. Once you confirm everything is as expected, click on Sync to Webflow CMS. 

b) This takes you to the last tread by choosing how often you would like this scraper to run. If it's a one-time scrape, you may ignore this part or may schedule to repeat the scraping as per your preference. 

Can it be more straightforward than this? 

Summing-up

With Web Scraping, there are endless possibilities. A successful Web Scraper knows which data his users might be interested in, and which blends well to his site's niche. Consider this to be similar to a Pizzeria offering a different pizza topping per slice. 

With Byteline's No-Code Web Scraper Tool, you can easily and quickly extract data to blend into a Webflow CMS content without the knowledge of any programming language. 

Let us know interesting ideas or something that you did through Web Scraping in your comments below.