Blocking ads and pop-ups | Documentation | Website Screenshot World

The two settings

Both switches are at the end of the Capture behaviour section of the Web Profile form, and both are on when you create a profile.

Value	Meaning
`Block ads`	Stops advertising from loading at all. The capture is cleaner, and it also finishes faster because the page is not waiting on ad networks.
`Dismiss pop-ups`	Answers cookie banners, hides known sign-up pop-ups, chat widgets and “open in the app” bars, and closes other overlays with their own close button — the boxes a page opens over itself. It looks again after scrolling, for the ones that only open then.

Leaving both on is right for nearly every purpose. Advertising is not part of the page you are archiving, it changes on every load, and it is what makes an otherwise identical daily capture look different every day.

Blocking ads makes captures faster, not just cleaner

Ad networks are frequently the slowest thing on a page. Blocking them is often the difference between a capture completing inside the page timeout and one that does not.

Press Escape

One more setting on the profile, off by default. It works whether the two switches above are on or off.

Value	Meaning
`Press Escape`	Presses the Escape key after the pop-up pass, and again after scrolling. Many modals close on Escape even when nothing else recognises them. A video presses it once, before recording starts.

To leave particular elements out of the picture — a sticky header, a chat bubble, a promotion bar — use Hide these elements on the Auto Schedule, below.

When a banner gets through

Sites build their consent dialogs and overlays in many different ways, so now and then one is not caught. Handle it on the schedule, under Page tweaks:

Click this element pointed at the accept or reject button, if you want the banner genuinely dismissed and the page captured in its post-consent state.
Hide these elements pointed at the banner’s container, if you only want it out of the picture.
Press Escape on the profile, for a modal that closes when you press Escape in your own browser.

The selectors live on the Auto Schedule because the right one is specific to a site; on a sitemap schedule, Hide these elements applies to every page of the sitemap. See advanced selectors.

A cookie can be quicker than a selector

If you know the consent cookie the site sets once a visitor accepts, setting it under Headers & cookies on the profile means the banner never appears in the first place — no selector, no click, nothing to break when the site redesigns its dialog. Cookies are not available on the free trial.

When to turn them off

You are monitoring the advertising itself — checking your own campaigns render, or recording which ads a competitor’s pages carry. Blocking would remove the thing you came for.
Ad blocking breaks the page — some sites detect a blocker and refuse to show content, or leave a large empty gap where the ad should be.
The overlay is the point — capturing your own promotional modal to prove it appeared needs Dismiss pop-ups off.

Give that its own profile

Turning blocking off on a shared profile changes every schedule using it. Where one page needs ads, clone the profile and change the copy — otherwise a month of other people’s archives quietly fills with advertising.