A single screenshot proves what a page said at one moment. A series of them proves how it changed — and that's the version of the question people actually end up asking. When did the competitor drop their price? How long did our promo page show the wrong terms? What did the landing page look like the week the campaign underperformed? None of these can be answered with a screenshot you take today, because the moment that matters is already in the past.
The only way to have yesterday's screenshot is to have set up the series before yesterday. This guide shows how to do that in a couple of minutes with a scheduled capture: a standing instruction that photographs a URL on a cadence you choose and files every shot in your library, where you can scroll back through the whole run.
If you're a developer and want to build this yourself, you can — a script calling a screenshot API from cron does the job. The trade is that you then own the scheduler, the storage, the file naming, and the question of whether it actually ran every day. A scheduled capture is the same outcome with those parts handled.
What a scheduled capture is
A schedule is a saved definition, not a repeated button press: the URL plus every capture setting — country, full page, device, viewport, image format, ad and cookie-banner removal — stored together, with every capture rendered from that definition. That's what keeps the series comparable: the settings can't drift between captures on their own, so unless you edit the schedule yourself, a difference between shot #1 and shot #40 is a difference in the page, not in how it was photographed.
Each capture lands in your library marked as scheduled, and each one is a full record page of its own — the image together with the source URL, the capture time, dimensions, and the settings used, timestamped by the service rather than by you. That's the same record format that makes a capture usable as evidence; a schedule simply produces one on the clock instead of on a click.
Setting it up
- Be on a plan. Scheduled captures come with any paid plan — plans start at $5/month on the pricing page — because the results need library storage to land in.
- Open Scheduled captures under your account and click New schedule — or start from a capture you already have: every saved screenshot has a Schedule this capture action that carries its URL and settings over, so "keep taking this exact shot" is one click plus a cadence.
- Choose the cadence: every day, weekdays, or weekly, at one or more hours of the day. Times are in UTC, and the form says so next to the control — no silent timezone guessing.
- Decide what to keep. By default the schedule keeps everything. If you'd rather have a rolling window than an ever-growing archive, set Keep only the newest — the form offers 30 days, 90 days, and 1 year buttons matched to your cadence — and the schedule will run indefinitely without ever filling your storage. Older captures from the schedule are deleted only after a successful new one — never before, and never another schedule's.
The first capture runs within a minute of saving, so you can confirm the shot looks right immediately instead of waiting for tomorrow's window.
The series survives the schedule. Captures stay in your library if you pause or delete the schedule — the history you've built is yours, not an appendage of the timer that built it.
Watching several pages? Each URL gets its own schedule, separately pausable and with its own history. On Lite and up you can paste a whole list of URLs and get a schedule per line in one step.
A record of every day — including the bad ones
Most DIY monitoring quietly rots: the cron job dies, the disk fills, and you discover the gap three months later, precisely when you needed that week's screenshots. So the strongest part of a scheduled capture isn't taking the picture — it's the ledger underneath it, which accounts for every scheduled window, not just the successful ones:
- Every window gets an entry: captured, skipped, or failed — and skips and failures come with the reason spelled out, not as blank space in the series.
- A missed window is recorded as missed, never faked. If the service was down at 06:00, the ledger says so. A capture labelled 06:00 was taken near 06:00 or it doesn't exist — nothing is rendered late and backdated.
- Hand-triggered captures are labelled by hand. There's a Capture now button for when you don't want to wait, and the ledger marks those shots as manually triggered. In a series you might one day show to someone else, "the machine took this every morning" and "someone pressed a button" stay distinguishable claims.
- A schedule that keeps failing pauses itself and tells you why, right on the schedules page — instead of hammering a dead URL every morning or, worse, failing silently forever.
What people use it for
Competitor pricing and plans. Point a daily schedule at a competitor's pricing page. When they change a price, restructure tiers, or quietly drop the "free forever" plan, you can name the day it happened and show the before and after — from your library, not from memory.
Your own commitments. Terms, delivery promises, promo banners, product claims: a daily capture of your own key pages is a cheap archive of what you actually displayed and when. The day a customer says "the site promised free returns in March", you have March on file. For the capture-it-once-before-it-changes version of this problem, see saving a page as evidence.
Campaign landing pages — from the right country. A schedule can capture through another country, so the page is photographed as visitors in that market see it: localized prices, region-specific offers, geo-redirects and all. One schedule per market, and you have a per-country history of what was actually served. More on how that works in the geotargeted screenshots guide.
Client sites, for agencies. A schedule per client homepage is a before/after archive that builds itself — useful for the redesign pitch, for the "what changed this quarter" review, and for the occasional "the site was broken all weekend" conversation.
Pages you're about to change. Turn a daily schedule on before a redesign or migration and you get a dated visual log of the rollout — including the states you didn't intend to ship.
Where the honest limits are
It's an archive, not an alarm. A schedule doesn't compare captures or notify you when the page changes — it builds the history you scroll through and search. If what you need is a ping the moment something changes, a dedicated change-detection service does that; what it typically won't give you is this part — the comparable, timestamped series showing exactly what the page looked like before and after. The two compose rather than compete.
Public pages only. The renderer visits the URL as a fresh, logged-out visitor. That keeps the series neutral — nothing was personalized to your account — but it means dashboards behind logins can't be captured this way.
Cadence has a floor and a ceiling. The finest schedule is hourly (pick every hour of the day), the coarsest is weekly. Every plan has a daily capture allowance — from 5 captures a day on the smallest plan to 1,700 a day on the largest — and each scheduled capture counts as one screenshot on your plan, like any other. The schedules page shows the allowance and what you're using before you save, and if your storage is heading toward full, it warns you weeks ahead instead of letting windows start skipping.
FAQ
How do I automatically take a screenshot of a website every day? Create a schedule at site-shot.com: open Scheduled captures under your account, enter the URL, pick the daily cadence and an hour (UTC), and save. The first capture runs within a minute, then every day after that on the clock. Each capture lands in your library with the URL, time, and settings on record. Scheduled captures are included with any paid plan.
Do I need to write code or run a server? No. A schedule is set up entirely in the browser and runs on the service's infrastructure — there's no script, cron job, or storage to maintain on your side. If you'd rather build it yourself, the same captures are available through the screenshot API.
What happens when a scheduled capture fails? The failure is recorded. Every scheduled window gets a ledger entry — captured, skipped, or failed, with the reason — so gaps in the series are visible and explained rather than silent. Missed windows are never backfilled or backdated, and a schedule that keeps failing pauses itself with the reason shown on the schedules page.
How long is the screenshot history kept? As long as your subscription is active — captures don't expire on their own. Per schedule, you choose between keeping everything and keeping a rolling window (for example the newest 30 days); with a window set, older captures are deleted only after a successful new one, and the schedule never fills your storage. Deleting a schedule keeps its captures in your library.
Can scheduled screenshots be taken from another country? Yes. Country is part of the schedule's definition, like every other setting — so a schedule can capture a page daily as it appears to visitors in a specific market, localized prices and geo-redirects included, and the whole series stays shot from that same country.
Want the history to start today? Capturing is free to try — no signup — at site-shot.com, and every plan on the pricing page includes scheduled captures and the library they land in.