Update: This process has been simplified for Swift 3

Loading the text of a webpage in Swift has not completely dropped its Objective-C origins, which makes the process a little bit less obvious than it should be. Fortunately it is only a few lines…

let url:NSURL = NSURL(string: "http://ebscer.com")!
let request:NSURLRequest = NSURLRequest(URL: url)
NSURLConnection.sendAsynchronousRequest(request, 
    queue: NSOperationQueue(),
    completionHandler: { (response:NSURLResponse?,
        data: NSData? error: NSError?) -> Void in
            let responseText:String = String(data: data!,
                encoding: NSUTF8StringEncoding)!
            print(responseText)
    })

You may also need to edit your plist file to whitelist the domain.