How to Scrape a Website: A Five-Step Workflow for Teams
Scraping means collecting publicly available data from websites automatically; in a business setting it usually feeds price comparison, market research and business intelligence. A project usually involves several people: the analyst who needs the data, the developer who builds the collector and the manager who signs off the budget. The five steps below take that group from a first brief to a clean, usable dataset, covering the data plan, proxy choice, rotation and pacing, parsing and growth.
The same ground rule holds at every step: collect only publicly available data, follow each website's terms of service and robots directives, and keep the request rate reasonable. For help choosing IPs, read which proxies suit web scraping; if proxies are new to the team, start with what proxies are and how they work.
We write these guides for e-commerce, marketing and agency teams that pay for proxies by the gigabyte.
Step 1: Write a one-page data brief
Before anyone writes code, agree a short brief: the exact fields the business needs (product name, price and availability, for example), the pages that hold them and how often the data must refresh. Next, find out whether the site publishes an official API or data feed. If it does, that route is almost always cleaner and more dependable than scraping. Finally, read the site's terms of service and robots directives, so everyone on the project knows what is in scope.
Step 2: Decide which proxy plan to buy
How well the target protects itself decides the plan:
- Sites with light defences → datacenter proxies (from $3.50/GB): quick responses at a low cost per GB.
- Sites that scrutinise server traffic, or data that changes by location → residential proxies (from $3.99/GB).
- Targets that turn standard IPs away → Residential Premium, which lifts the success rate.
Step 3: Agree pacing and rotation settings
Configure the scraper to send its traffic to the proxy gateway, then choose how IPs rotate: per-request rotation when each page stands alone, sticky sessions when a task spans several pages. Build in a short, randomised pause between requests and a ceiling on concurrent connections, so the target never carries an unreasonable load. Give every request a sensible timeout, and when a temporary error comes back, wait and retry with backoff instead of firing again at once.
Step 4: Collect, parse and hand over the data
Each page comes back through the proxy as HTML, and a parser extracts the agreed fields; CSS selectors or XPath do the job in most stacks. Save the output somewhere the rest of the business can reach it, such as a CSV export or a database table, and keep a cache so unchanged pages are not downloaded again. The table below sums up the whole workflow.
| Step | Team action | Practical tip |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Plan | Write the brief; look for an API | An official feed beats scraping |
| 2. Proxy | Choose datacenter or residential | The site’s defences decide |
| 3. Rotate | Set per-request or sticky rotation | Random pauses, capped concurrency |
| 4. Parse | Parse fields with CSS/XPath; save them | Cache so each page downloads once |
| 5. Scale | Grow volume within site terms | Render JavaScript only when required |
Step 5: Scale up without cutting corners
Growth should not loosen the rules. Larger runs still collect only publicly available data, still honour terms of service and robots directives, still throttle their request rate and, where appropriate, still identify the crawler honestly. At scale, bandwidth becomes the main cost: a headless browser downloads far more per page than a plain HTTP request, so render JavaScript only on pages that cannot be read without it. Before raising volume, rerun the proxy calculator with the new page counts, check the per-GB rate for each type on the pricing page and buy proxies for the larger run. Access is never assured at any scale, and each site's terms continue to apply.
Match the pool to the workflow
Every pool is billed per GB and run from the same dashboard, so one team can keep low-cost volume work and high-trust checks side by side.
High-volume collection from unprotected sites, automation, SEO tools
Market research, ad verification and geo-accurate checks on protected sites
Phone-first platforms, app and mobile ad testing
Hard targets where every failed request is costly
Covering several markets in one report? MIX packages combine multi-country residential traffic in a single order. Agencies buying on behalf of clients can apply for the reseller programme.
Get your team running
Per-GB pricing from $3.50 · 55+ countries · instant delivery · 30-day validity · no traffic logs · 24/7 human support
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1
Size the job
Pick a proxy type in the proxy calculator and enter the gigabytes you expect to use to see the order total.
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2
Order and pay
Choose the pool on the proxies page and pay by card through Stripe or in crypto through Cryptomus. Each order is billed per GB and does not renew on its own.
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3
Share access
Credentials appear in the dashboard as soon as payment clears. Add them to each tool with a login or an IP whitelist, then send one test request before the real job starts.
Questions team leads ask
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