What is the most lightweight way to take screenshots of a website

If you want to take a screenshot of a website, that means you have to render the website. In order to render a website, you need a full browser. That's the only way.

You think you're only using one feature, but you're using a full browser.

Whether or not you use SaaS (who will also use puppeteer) or puppeteer to do it, you will have to render the full website.

You can use chromium with puppeteer instead of chrome, if you want.

The easiest way is going to be rendering with puppeteer.

Try Pico https://github.com/rsify/pico

Is it a complex site / image that you want to create? As the other comments say, puppeteer/similar may be your only.option as you need to render the entire website.

Edit: I don't know if this is for your own website or to screenshot external ones. If its for you then:

If its not that complex or you can make it simpler there are solutions that transform a smaller subset of html to svg, then you can convert this svg to a jpg or a pdf without actually rendering the page.

https://github.com/vercel/satori, I use satori to generate some images for products. I'm looking to use it to generate pdfs in browser without requiring a server-side endpoint, as it also works in the browser.

https://github.com/wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltopdf, the old html > pdf converter that is archived. In some places this may be the solution. (You should not use this with untrusted sources)

There's add-on in browser for that.

It will even make a long picture if you have a scrollbar.

See if any of these methods would do. (I struggled to capture a nodejs screenshot without ads and cookie banners; eventually, phantomjs worked for me. Now, I don't know if this is a factor for you, but either way, you can glance at the listed options. A couple weren't mentioned here so far.)