The Problem With Purchased Contact Lists
Most B2B sales teams have experienced the same frustration: you buy a contact database, load it into your CRM, send your first campaign, and discover that 25-35% of the email addresses bounce, the companies no longer exist, or the contacts moved on years ago.
This is not an accident. Contact list vendors typically collect data once and then sell it repeatedly. The longer a record sits in a database without verification, the less accurate it becomes. Research consistently shows that business email lists decay between 20% and 30% per year through job changes, company closures, and updated contact details.
The alternative is to source contact information directly from where businesses themselves publish it: their own websites.
How Website Contact Data Works
The WhoisExtractor Website Database is built from a daily crawl of live business websites. The crawler extracts email addresses and phone numbers that businesses have actively published on their own sites - the same information a prospective customer or partner would find when visiting those pages.
Because the data comes from live websites, not archived snapshots, it reflects the business's current, intentionally public contact details. Companies that have changed their email or phone number have updated their website, and that update is captured in the next daily refresh.
The daily data is delivered as a zipped CSV file via the Website Database daily details feed. Each record includes:
- Domain name
- Company website URL
- Extracted email addresses (one or more per domain)
- Extracted phone numbers
- Collection date
Volume and Coverage
The website database grows daily. Each day's CSV contains newly crawled websites and updated records - you receive both the additions and any changed contact details from previously crawled sites. The complete domain list contains all domains currently in the database.
For businesses that need historical comparison - for example, tracking when a company changed its contact email - the archived website database is also available.
How This Compares to WHOIS Contact Data
Both the Website Database and the WHOIS Database can provide email addresses, but they come from different sources and serve different purposes:
| Source | Data origin | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Website Database | Publicly listed on the live website | Reaching the business as a customer would |
| WHOIS Database | Domain registration record | Reaching the domain registrant / legal owner |
For lead generation, website contact data typically has higher deliverability because it represents an email address the business actively uses to receive public enquiries. WHOIS data is more valuable for ownership research and legal/compliance workflows.
Many teams use both - see the full lead generation use case for workflow examples.
Using the Free Email Extractor Tool
If you want to extract contact information from a specific list of websites before committing to a database subscription, the free Email Address Extractor tool lets you upload an HTML page, a CSV of URLs, or a plain text file and extract all email addresses from the content. It is a useful tool for smaller manual research tasks.
For bulk, automated daily delivery of website contact data across thousands of domains, the database is the more efficient option.
Integrating Website Contact Data Into Your Workflow
The CSV format makes integration straightforward:
CRM import: Load the CSV directly into Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho, or any CRM with a CSV import feature. Set the collection date as a custom field so your team knows how fresh each record is.
Outreach automation: Use the CSV as a data source for email sequencing tools. Because the contact information is already structured and clean, minimal preprocessing is required.
API delivery: For teams that want data delivered automatically every morning without manual downloads, the API supports scheduled pulls. One GET request with your API key downloads the day's CSV file.
Combining with domain discovery: Start with the Domains Database daily feed to identify newly registered domains, then check the Website Database for those domains a few weeks later once their sites are live. This creates a pipeline that catches businesses at the earliest opportunity.
Plans and Pricing
The Website Database is available as a standalone subscription or bundled with the WHOIS Database or Domains Database. View all options on the pricing page.
If you want to evaluate the data format before subscribing, you can download a sample file or contact the team to discuss your specific use case.
