How to Load More Results When Web Scraping Using CSS Selectors
One of the common challenges in web scraping is dealing with paginated content or “load more” buttons. Many websites initially display a limited number of results to improve page loading times, requiring user interaction to view additional content.
A perfect example of this limitation is when a website only shows the top 10 results by default. To access more data, users typically need to click a “See more products” button. For scrapers, this presents an automation challenge.
Fortunately, there’s an effective solution using CSS selectors. By inspecting the “load more” button on a webpage (using right-click and inspect), you can copy the specific CSS selector that uniquely identifies this element. This selector becomes the key to programmatically triggering the button in your scraping script.
The process involves:
- Waiting for the page to load completely (typically one second)
- Clicking the element identified by the copied CSS selector
- Waiting again for the new content to load
This simple sequence effectively doubles your available data from 10 to 20 results. By repeating this pattern multiple times in your code, you can easily expand your scraping capacity to collect 100 or even 200 leads from a single page.
This technique eliminates the need for complex pagination handling and allows for more comprehensive data collection while respecting the website’s intended user experience flow.