So I’ve been looking at ready-to-use templates for puppeteer-based web scraping. The promise is obvious: grab a template, customize it for your data extraction needs, and you’re live in minutes. No writing boilerplate, no setting up the basics.
But I’m skeptical. Every site I need to scrape is slightly different. Does a template really save time when you’re spending half the day customizing it anyway? Or is it actually faster to just write it from scratch at that point?
I’m trying to enable non-technical people on my team to handle basic data extraction tasks without involving engineering. Templates seem like the right answer, but I want to hear from people who’ve actually used them. Did they genuinely speed up your work, or did you end up rewriting most of it?
Templates absolutely save time, but only if they match your use case closely. Generic templates for pagination and data extraction do the heavy lifting on setup.
Where I see real value is using templates with a no-code builder that handles pagination automatically. You drop in a URL, define your selectors, and the template handles the iteration and data cleanup. That’s the part that normally takes the longest to debug.
For non-technical people, this is the only way forward. They can adapt a template visually without touching code. The alternative is they wait for engineering, which delays everything.
I had the same concern. Turned out templates saved more time than I expected, but not because they eliminated customization. It’s because the template handles all the error handling and pagination logic upfront. I just had to adjust selectors and field mapping.
The real time saver was not having to rebuild retry logic or handle timeouts myself. Those parts are already baked in. What used to take two days now takes a few hours.
Templates work best when you’re dealing with similar page structures. If you’re scraping different sites with completely different layouts, you’ll find yourself modifying more than you expected. However, the foundation is solid. Things like handling pagination, managing browser instances, and data extraction patterns are already tested. You’re not reinventing those wheels, which is significant. The customization part is usually just selector updates and minor logic adjustments.