Crawlers being blocked by websites while crawling websites is the most irritating situation. To become a great web crawler, you must not only be capable of writing XPath selectors or CSS selectors quickly, but you must also be able to design your crawlers in a way that will make them even more efficient, especially in the long run. To accelerate web crawling, the task at hand is to construct a more rapid and efficient [Crawler](https://crawlbase.com/anonymous-crawler-asynchronous-scraping) for navigating the vast expanse of the internet.

The term "web crawler" refers to a software application used to automate the process of retrieving information from the Internet. It is possible to automate maintenance tasks on a website using web crawlers, such as validating the HTML and checking the links on the site. An HTML validator, also referred to as a quality assurance program, is a software program that checks whether HTML mark-up elements have any syntax errors before they are displayed online. Internet bots, or automatic indexers, are also called internet bots.

A web crawler updates the web content of one site or indexes the web content of another site, and they can be used to index pages that have been downloaded to provide faster searching. By indexing pages, you are checking which pages are highly searched and storing them in a database so that the most relevant results are displayed to users. It is also possible to download all the content from a website using web crawlers.

**Web Crawler**

In other words, a web crawler indexes information on websites by crawling the Internet. Crawlers are also known as spiders, spider bots, or crawler programs.

A web crawler will visit the seeds after visiting a collection of URLs. A list of all the essential hyperlinks on the pages is then created and added to the list of URLs to be visited. Recursively, they are visited based on a set of policies. Snapshots are saved as the crawler saves and archives data as it goes.

**Essential Elements to Consider When Building A Web Crawler**
What is the best way to determine a good web crawler? Here are a few things you might want to consider:
* Crawler speed
Would you be able to scrape the data within your limited timeframe?
* The completeness of the scraped data
Have you been able to scrape all the data you need?
* Data scraped accuracy
What are the best ways to ensure that the data scraped is accurate?
* Web crawler scalability
When the number of websites increases, could you scale the web crawler?

**5 Steps to Build a Faster Web Crawler**

**Scraping Strategy Optimization**

The three scraping techniques described in this section will significantly increase your speed. If you use a single large spider, split it into many smaller ones. By doing so, you will be able to use Crawlbase. Multiple spiders can be run simultaneously with Crawlbase. Each smaller spider will cover a portion of the more enormous spider crawled during its crawl. A mini-spider should not crawl the same content twice, as it will waste time. Your scraping process will be ten times faster if you split one spider into ten smaller ones.

**Once one record is scraped, write the data to CSV**

My previous scraping method outputs records once - when all records are scraped. Nevertheless, this might not be the most efficient way to accomplish the task.

You could, instead, write into the file after scraping a record so that if a problem arises, you can fix the file. You can restart your crawler/scraper from the website where the problem occurred, for example (if your computer stops working, or maybe your program stops because of an error).

**Website blocking times should be reduced**

A good crawling framework will reduce your effort in implementing stuff so that crawlers or scrapers won't get blocked. It is recommended to use Crawlbase as it has already implemented several measures to decrease the number of times the website will block you.

* Before scraping a website, always read robots.txt.
* To make your scraper/crawler slower, use the download delay or auto throttling mechanisms already in the Crawlbase framework.
* To disguise your requests, rotate a few IP addresses and user agents. This service offers a large pool of proxies for you to rotate if you are looking for proxy services.
* Random clicking and scrolling do mimic human behavior if you are using scraps-splash or selenium.

**API data retrieval**

You can scrape the website or use their API, depending on your needs. You will be able to make your life a lot easier if you use an API to access their data instead of going through the hurdles!

**Reducing the number of requests**

Scrapers are the slowest to use when sending requests and waiting for responses. Scrapers will run much faster if you reduce the number of requests sent. Visiting each item's page is unnecessary if you scrape prices and titles from an e-commerce site. All the information you need can be found on the results page.

With this technique, your scraper will be 30 times faster (it only needs to send one request instead of 30) if you have 30 items per page. Look for ways to reduce the number of requests you receive.

**Best Web Crawlers Tools**
The following are the top 4 best web crawler tools, along with their features and pricing.

**Crawlbase**
Using Crawlbase, you can crawl websites that use AJAX, JavaScript, cookies, and other similar technologies to collect data. As a result of its machine learning technology, the company can read, evaluate, and convert web content into useful information for the user.

Besides Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, Crawlbase also supports Linux. You can establish at least 20 private scraping projects with paid membership levels. It is also possible to use the web app integrated into the browser and the desktop app—the number of public projects you can create on Crawlbase as freeware is limited to five.

**Helium Scraper**

A web data crawling program called Helium Scraper excels when there is a minimal correlation between the data gathered pieces. You do not need to know any coding or setting to use it. There are also online templates that users of particular crawling requirements can download. There is a good chance that this can meet the basic needs of users when it comes to crawling.

**Spinn3r**

Spinn3r's web crawler tool allows you to pull content from blogs, news sites, social media sites, RSS feeds, and ATOM feeds in their entirety using a single click. With Spinn3r, you are provided withs an API that handles 95% of your indexing work. It also contains a spam protection tool, which ensures that spam and incorrect language usage are eliminated from the crawling process, enhancing the security of the data.

In the same way that Google indexes content, Spinn3r does the same, and the extracted data is saved as JSON files. To provide you with real-time articles, the web scraper is constantly monitoring the web for updates from different sources to provide you with the latest information.

**Webharvy**

A free program named Webharvy has an easy-to-use graphical interface that allows you to scrape websites. There is no need to be a programmer to use this program. It is possible to scrape text, photos, URLs, and emails from websites using WebHarvy and save them in various formats. You can use a proxy server or a VPN service to access target websites.

**Conclusion**

Web crawling can extract data from a wide variety of web pages. If you want to extract large amounts of data from multiple websites in the format that you require, we recommend using a tool such as Crawlbase. The article above explains five steps to building a faster web crawler and the best tools available to build a faster web crawler in the market. To build a faster web crawler, leverage the power of [cloud-based SaaS solutions](https://reviewdip.com/the-benefits-of-cloud-based-saas-solutions/) for efficient data extraction, indexing, and processing at scale. Thank you for taking the time to read this article. Hopefully, it will be helpful to you in some way.