Pages on a website

Bowey123

Is there anyway of working out how many pages a website has without counting them individually?

DE_612183

you could see if the site has a "site map"

Neil_Jones

Bowey123 said:

Is there anyway of working out how many pages a website has without counting them individually?

Without a site map probably not.

But even then no guarantee the site map has everything on the website.

So-called "dynamic" websites mean the number of pages on a website can theoretically be infinite.

onomatopoeia99

wget is a free program to download web pages as files and can be used to fetch recursively following links, so you could instructed it to download the whole site, then count the files on your disk with dir /s

PHK

As @Neil_Jones hints , websites nowadays don't normally have a pre-defined number of pages for several reasons. 

A page might scroll infinitely bringing in new (or old) content as it goes. 

Pages may be generated on the fly based on what you've done previously, whether you're logged in, the time of day or numerous other conditions. 

What look like pages might actually be an active element on the previous page. 

Different parts of a site may be hosted on different servers. 

The same page might exist on multiple servers to balance out load on the site. 

And so on. 

flaneurs_lobster

onomatopoeia99 said:

wget is a free program to download web pages as files and can be used to fetch recursively following links, so you could instructed it to download the whole site, then count the files on your disk with dir /s

There's a blast from my geek past. 

Nerd practical joke - point wget  at bbc.co.uk to retrieve the entire site - on someone else's PC. 

Oh how we laughed.....