Taking website screenshots

Run a screenshot test

• Go to Screenshots in the WonderProxy account dashboard
• Enter the Target URL of the webpage you want to screenshot
• Enter the server locations you want to take screenshots from (you can only choose servers that have been added to your account)
• Submit the form, and the screenshot results will be displayed below the form

Admin control

Account admins can enable or disable screenshot functionality globally for an account in the dashboard team settings.

Screenshot history

A record of all account screenshot tests is listed on the screenshots history page. The data will be available for 6 months after the screenshot test was run.

How it works

The actual worker process that takes screenshots is located in a single datacenter, but the requests are routed through the proxy servers you have selected for the test. It does not use up your account's traffic allowance, but physically uses the same server.

Once the screenshot process has stared asynchronously, we do a separate check that abandons the test if the site might contain any questionable or illegal content.

We use Playwright to launch a headless version of the Chromium browser, with language locale and JavaScript geolocation set to be in the selected location.

The automated browser then attempts to load the requested page, waits for the JavaScript load event to fire, scrolls to the bottom (as best possible) and then takes a fullpage screenshot.

Finally, the screenshot is processed with some lossy compression to reduce the filesize and then uploaded to persistent storage so it can be linked to.

We need to depend on timeouts at various steps in this process, so it can make you wait a little for the results (although we've optimised it as much as possible).

Any failed tests will often succeed if you run them again, but if you persistently get unexpected results you can get in touch.