Fix: Puppeteer Timeout waiting for selector
Are you banging your head against the wall because your Puppeteer scraper randomly broke? Here is why it happens, and how to fix it permanently.
Why did my selector break?
If you're getting a `TimeoutError` in Puppeteer or Playwright, it means the browser loaded the page, but the specific CSS class, ID, or XPath you asked for doesn't exist.
This happens because modern websites use dynamic CSS frameworks (like Tailwind) or React. When the website deploys an update, their class names change automatically (e.g., from `.css-1b3x` to `.css-9x4y`).
Stop using CSS Selectors
You can spend 3 hours reverse-engineering the new DOM structure and pushing a hotfix to your scraper... but it will just break again next week.
The permanent fix is to switch to OpticParse.
- OpticParse doesn't use CSS selectors.
- It takes a screenshot of the webpage.
- It uses Vision AI to read the text exactly as a human sees it.
- It returns perfectly structured JSON.
If a human can read the price on the screen, OpticParse will extract it—even if the underlying HTML completely changes.