What is the best method to extract visible text from a web element using Selenium in Python?

The most common way is using the .text property, which returns the visible text as it appears on the page. However, if the element is hidden or not yet rendered, .text will return an empty string. In those cases, I highly recommend using element.get_attribute('textContent'), as this pulls the text directly from the DOM regardless of visibility. To handle timing issues, you should always use WebDriverWait combined with expected_conditions. This ensures your script waits until the element is actually present in the DOM before you attempt to call any methods on it, which prevents the majority of common synchronization errors in automated testing.

This approach is helpful, but if I am scraping a large table, does using WebDriverWait on every single cell slow down the execution significantly? Is there a more efficient way to wait for the whole container?