Is it legal to copy a website?

What copyright, trademark and font licences say about copying a page: the routine uses, the risky ones, and a checklist before you publish.

2026-09-035 min read

Short version: making a copy is almost never the problem. What you do with it is. This is a practitioner's guide, not legal advice — for anything with money attached, ask a lawyer in your jurisdiction.

What is actually protected

A page is a bundle of separately-owned things, and they do not all have the same rules.

Text, photographs, illustrations, video, icons — copyrighted by whoever made them, automatically, with no notice required.
HTML, CSS and JavaScript — code, and code is copyrighted too. "It's in view-source" is not a licence.
Fonts — licensed, not sold. A webfont licence covers named domains and page-view volumes; copying the woff2 to your server is a licence breach even when the design is yours.
Logos, brand names, product names — trademarks. Even a copy for internal use should not go public with their marks on it.
Layout, spacing, "the vibe" — mostly not protected. Ideas, functional layouts and conventions are free; a specific creative expression of them is not.
Facts, prices, listings — individual facts are not copyrightable, though a whole database can be protected in some jurisdictions (the EU database right), and copying it may breach the site's terms of service.

That last distinction is where most honest confusion sits: you can be inspired by a structure — hero, three feature cards, logo strip, pricing table — without touching anything protected. You cannot take their hero image, their headline and their stylesheet.

Uses that are routine

Offline reading and personal reference. Ordinary, and in many jurisdictions explicitly permitted.
Migrating a site you own or are contracted to work on. The most common professional use, and the one CopyAnySite was built for: get the current design into a new CMS without hand-rebuilding it.
Design study. Capturing pages to look at how spacing, type scale and motion were done.
Evidence and compliance. Recording what a page said on a date — pricing, disclosures, a competitor's claim, a takedown-worthy post.
QA and regression testing. Capturing your own pages so you can diff them after a deploy.
Building a starting point for a client's page from their own existing site.

Uses that get you in trouble

Republishing their content as yours. Same words, same images, new domain. This is the clearest infringement there is and the easiest to prove.
Passing off. Copying a brand closely enough that a visitor thinks they are dealing with that company — a trademark problem, and in many countries a consumer-protection one.
Phishing or credential harvesting. A copy of a login page is a crime, not an SEO tactic. It is also the reason honest tools in this category get blocked, so we take it seriously: capture only what you can already open, never publish a copy of anyone's sign-in flow.
Re-hosting somebody else's licensed fonts. Extremely common in migrations, and foundries actively scan for it.
Copying personal data. A page rendered while you are logged in can contain other people's names, emails and order history. Publishing that is a data-protection problem, whatever the copyright position.
Scraping in defiance of terms or robots rules, at volume, to rebuild a service. Different area of law, same outcome.

The font trap, specifically

If you take a copy of a design-led page, you have very likely taken a commercial webfont with it. Before you publish:

Identify the faces the page actually renders in (our free font finder lists them from the live page).
Decide, for each: do you have a licence, is it open-source (SIL OFL, Apache), or does it have to be replaced?
If it has to go, swap it before launch and re-check line breaks — metrics differ and layouts move.

A checklist before you publish anything built from a copy

Replace every image, icon and video with your own or a properly licensed asset.
Rewrite the text. Genuinely — not synonym-swapped.
Remove every logo, brand name and product name that is not yours.
Replace or license the fonts.
Delete any personal data that came along in the capture.
Keep the structure, spacing and interaction patterns you liked; those are the parts that were never protected.
Check the source's terms of service if you have an account there — contract can bind you where copyright would not.

Done in that order, what you ship is your content in a layout you learned from. That is how the industry has always worked.

Where CopyAnySite stands

The extension captures pages you can already open in your own browser. It does not bypass paywalls, defeat DRM, break authentication or crawl behind logins for you. It exists for migrations, archives, evidence, QA and design study — and the export deliberately keeps the original's assets embedded rather than hotlinked, because a copy that keeps hammering someone else's server is both fragile and rude.

FAQ

Is it illegal to copy a website's design?

Copying the general layout and structure is usually not infringement, because functional layouts and ideas are not protected. Copying the specific expression — their images, text, icons, stylesheet and fonts — is. Take the arrangement, replace the assets.

Can I copy a website for personal use?

In most jurisdictions saving a page for your own offline reading or reference is fine. Publishing or distributing that copy is a different act with different rules.

Can I get sued for copying a website?

Yes, if you republish protected material, use someone's trademarks, or re-host licensed fonts. In practice most disputes start as a takedown request from a host or a foundry invoice rather than a lawsuit.

Is web scraping the same thing as copying a page?

No. Scraping extracts data from many pages, usually automatically, and its legal questions are mostly about terms of service, access controls and database rights. Copying a page is about the copyrighted material on that one page. See web scraping vs page capture.

Do I need permission to archive a page as evidence?

Generally no — you are recording what was published to you. Keep the capture unmodified, note the date and the URL, and prefer a format that shows the page as rendered.

Try it on the page you are looking at

CopyAnySite is a Chrome extension: open any page you can reach, press capture, and take away a standalone HTML file, an editable WordPress page, or a kit a coding agent can build from. The free key needs no card.

Download CopyAnySite