The Problem With XPath, CSS Selectors, and Keeping Your Scraper Alive
If you’ve spent any time in the weeds of web scraping, you know what the worst part is. It’s not the proxies. It’s not getting blocked. It’s not even the parsing.
It’s maintenance.
That moment when you realize a page structure has changed and your entire scraper, possibly hundreds of lines of hand-crafted selectors, is now useless. You start debugging. You open dev tools, inspect the new DOM, rewrite your XPath or CSS selectors, test again, and hope this layout sticks around for a while.
Except it doesn’t. Because layouts always change.
Websites aren’t built for consistency. They’re built to ship fast, look good, and change often. Which means any scraper you build today is likely going to break tomorrow.
This is especially true if you’re working at scale, scraping hundreds of domains, thousands of URLs, or entire archives of articles. With every new site comes a new structure. And with every structure comes another fragile selector that can break without warning. You don’t just write scrapers; you maintain them. Constantly.
And that’s where things start to unravel.
Why Traditional Scrapers Break (All the Time)
Let’s say you’re scraping articles from a media site. You’ve built a beautiful scraper -clean, reliable, maybe even modular. But the moment that site changes how articles are structured, whether they’ve moved content blocks, wrapped headlines in a new div, or obfuscated data behind JavaScript, your scraper stops working.
Not partially. Completely.
Suddenly, your dataset is missing half the articles. Or worse, it’s returning malformed JSON, with headers pulled as body text or tags nested where author names should be. And now you’re not just losing time, you’re losing trust in the data.
Scraper maintenance becomes a full-time job. One you probably didn’t sign up for.
There’s a Smarter Way to Do This
Here’s the thing: writing selectors is a solved problem. And maintaining them manually shouldn’t be part of your daily workflow.
That’s why automated extraction matters.
Instead of relying on brittle, hand-coded selectors, you can now use a web scraping API that understands the structure of a page. One that extracts article content, metadata, and even handles pagination automatically.
You send a URL. You get structured JSON back. That’s it.
No XPath. No CSS. No DOM spelunking. Just clean, reliable content in the format you need.
Tools like Zyte API now let you extract full articles from nearly any page on the web with a single parameter—article_list=true. What used to take hours of reverse-engineering and debugging can now be done in seconds, at scale, with far less overhead.
And more importantly, it holds up when the layout changes.
Pagination, Metadata, and the Things That Usually Break
One of the most frustrating parts of scraping article-based sites is pagination. Articles are rarely contained on a single page, especially in news archives or multi-entry blogs. You need to identify pagination controls, extract URLs, follow them in the right order, and make sure nothing gets duplicated or missed.
With automated scraping, pagination is baked in. The API navigates through article lists on its own, following internal logic to retrieve each page until the archive is fully extracted. You don’t have to write rules. You don’t have to guess what the next button is labeled.
The same goes for metadata, titles, authors, publication dates, tags. These are often hidden deep within scripts or data attributes, and pulling them reliably is tricky even on static sites. But with a smart scraper, that’s already handled. The output includes metadata consistently, no matter how or where it’s embedded.
Even dynamic sites, the kind built entirely in JavaScript, don’t pose a problem. The API renders pages as a browser would, capturing content that wouldn’t be available through a static HTML request.
So Why Are You Still Writing Selectors?
Let’s be honest. Writing XPath expressions might have felt fun in the beginning. It gave you control. It gave you precision. But now, it’s just technical debt. Every new site is another problem waiting to happen. Every layout shift is a fire drill.
And there’s really no good reason to keep doing it.
Modern scraping tools have evolved beyond hand-coded selectors. They’re smarter, more resilient, and most importantly, they free you up to focus on what matters: the data.
If your pipeline still breaks every time a site changes its structure, it’s not your fault. But it is your responsibility to evolve.
There’s a better way to scrape the web. You don’t need to hardcode scrapers anymore. You just need to stop treating web data like it’s fragile, and start treating it like it’s programmable.
Because it is.