How to Download All PDFs from a Website

You've found the right website. It has exactly the research papers, product manuals, financial reports, or training documents you need — dozens of them, maybe hundreds. Now comes the frustrating part: clicking each PDF link, waiting for it to open, right-clicking to save, and repeating the whole process fifty more times.

There's a much faster way. This guide shows you how to download all PDFs from any website in bulk — in under a minute, with no software to install.

Why PDFs Are the Most Common Bulk Download Target

PDFs remain the dominant format for formal documents on the web. According to Google's web crawl data, PDF is consistently among the top five file types indexed across the public web.

Common scenarios where you need all the PDFs from a site:

• Academic research: Downloading all papers from a journal's archive or a university's publications page
• Legal and compliance: Collecting regulatory filings, policy documents, or contract templates
• Product documentation: Saving an entire vendor's technical manual library locally
• Competitive research: Archiving white papers and reports from industry sites

The Manual Method (and Why It Fails)

Most people start by right-clicking each PDF link and choosing "Save As." This works for two or three files. For twenty, it's tedious. For two hundred, it's completely impractical.

Some people turn to browser extensions that try to detect and download links. These work inconsistently, require installation, and are often flagged as privacy risks because they can read everything you browse.

Others resort to command-line tools like wget:

wget -r -A.pdf https://example.com

This is powerful but requires technical knowledge, a terminal, and comfort with command-line flags. Most people don't want to go down that path just to save a folder of PDFs.

How to Download All PDFs from a Website with FileGrab

FileGrab solves this without any of those complications. Here's the process:

Step 1: Open FileGrab and Paste the URL

Go to filegrab.io/app and paste the URL of the page (or domain) where the PDFs are hosted.

Step 2: Run the Scan

FileGrab fetches the page server-side and extracts every file link it finds. Within a few seconds, you'll see a list of all downloadable files, including every PDF on that page.

Step 3: Filter by PDF

Click the PDF filter chip at the top of the results. This instantly narrows the file list to PDFs only — hiding images, ZIPs, and other formats you don't need.

Step 4: Select All and Download as ZIP

Click Select all, then hit Download ZIP. FileGrab downloads all selected PDFs on the server and packages them into a single ZIP archive that streams directly to your browser.

One click. All your PDFs. Done.

Scanning an Entire Domain for PDFs

If the PDFs are spread across multiple pages of a site — not just one page — use FileGrab's Domain Crawl mode. Enter the root domain (e.g. example.com) and FileGrab will follow internal links across the whole site, collecting every PDF it finds.

This is perfect for:

• University research portals with PDFs spread across department pages
• Government websites with downloadable reports across multiple sections
• Corporate sites where white papers live in different subdirectories

Pro users can crawl up to 2,500 pages. The domain crawl feature is available on the Pro plan.

How Many PDFs Can You Download at Once?

There's no hard limit on how many PDFs FileGrab can find. The practical limit depends on:

• Number of pages scanned: Free users scan up to 30 pages; Pro users up to 2,500
• ZIP size: Very large collections (thousands of PDFs totalling multiple gigabytes) may take several minutes to package

For most use cases — a few hundred PDFs from a documentation site or academic archive — FileGrab handles it in well under a minute.

Does FileGrab Work on Password-Protected Sites?

FileGrab fetches pages from its own server, so it can only access publicly available content. Password-protected pages, paywalled journals, and sites requiring login are not accessible.

For academic papers specifically, many institutions publish open-access versions. Tools like Unpaywall can help you find freely available versions of paywalled research.

Other File Types You Can Bulk Download

While this guide focuses on PDFs, FileGrab works with any downloadable file format — images, audio, video, spreadsheets, archives, and more. If it's linked in the page HTML, FileGrab finds it.

Check out our guide on downloading all videos from a website for a similar walkthrough focused on video files.

Ready to Try It?

Sign up free at FileGrab — no credit card required. You get 20 credits on signup to start scanning immediately. Each URL scan costs 1 credit. A ZIP download costs 3 credits.

Need more? Buy a credit pack or upgrade to Pro for unlimited everything.