How to Save Web Pages in Internet Explorer 11

Download a web page to view it offline or save the info for later

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by Scott Orgera
Scott Orgera has been a tech journalist since 2007. He has 25+ years' experience as a programmer and QA leader and several Microsoft certifications.
Updated February 12, 2019

There are several reasons why you may want to save a copy of a web page to your hard drive, ranging from offline reading to source code analysis.

No matter your motive, Internet Explorer 11 makes it really easy to store pages locally. Depending on the page's structure, this could include all of its corresponding code as well as images and other multimedia files.

How to Download IE11 Web Pages

You can step through these instructions as is or you can quickly jump to Step 3 by using the Ctrl+S Internet Explorer keyboard shortcut in lieu of using the menus explained here.

  1. Open the Internet Explorer menu by clicking/tapping the gear icon at the top right or hitting Alt+X.

  2. Navigate to File > Save as... or enter the Ctrl+S keyboard shortcut.

  3. Choose an appropriate "Save as type:" from the bottom of the Save Webpage window.

    Here are your options:

    Web Archive, single file (*.mht): This option will package the whole page, including any images, animations, and media content like audio data, into an MHT file. This is useful if you want the full page to be saved offline so that even if the images and other data are removed from the website, or the whole site is shut down, you can still access what you saved here.

    Webpage, HTML only (*.htm;*html): Use this option in IE to save just the text version of the page. Any other references, like to images, audio data, etc., is a simple text reference to it online, so it doesn't actually save that content to the computer (only the text). However, so long as the referenced data still exists online, this HTML page will still show it since it does contain the placeholders for that kind of data.

    Webpage, complete (*.htm;*html): This is the same as the "HTML only" option above except that the images and other data on the live page, are included in this offline version. This means that the page's text and images, etc. are saved for offline use. This option is similar to the MHT option above except that with this selection, folders are created that house the images and other data.

    Text File (*.txt): This will only save text data. This means no images or even image placeholders are saved. When you open this file, you just see the text that was on the live page, and nothing more.

  4. Give the file a name, choose a location, and then select Save.