You're reading an intriguing article on your favorite publication, but it hits y'all with a paywall halfway through. If you lot can't currently afford to pay a subscription fee, or you're having problems making payment, the tricks below can help y'all bypass paywalls and read subscription-based content for free.

Before we proceed, nosotros should mention that all paywalls aren't built the same. Hence, ane method may non become you around the paywall of all websites. It'southward also important to state that this post is purely informational; we aren't advocating bypassing paywalls.

Types of Paywall

A lot of effort and resources become into content cosmos. Publishers need to make more coin to create top-quality content. For this reason, many online publishers utilize paywalls to increment revenue generation. Users who pay a specified fee will have admission to locked or paywalled content. At that place are two major types of paywalls:

1. Hard Paywalls

This blazon of paywall requires upfront payment of a (subscription) fee before accessing any content. Websites with difficult paywalls will only let you lot read an article's snippet. Yous'll need to pay a subscription fee to access the full content.

2. Soft Paywalls

Publications using soft paywalls let non-paying members to read a express number of articles for a fixed period/session. Medium is 1 publishing platform that uses a soft paywall. Members without a subscription can only read 3 articles for costless in a month. This type of paywall is typically easier to bypass.

How to Read News Article for Free

The technique to employ will vary depending on the blazon of paywall employed past the website administrator. Nonetheless, we're confident that at to the lowest degree one of the tricks below should grant you access to content that requires a subscription.

1. Stop Loading the Page

This is one quick technique that'southward effective on several web pages. The trick is to stop your browser from fully loading the web page as soon every bit your browser displays the text element of the paywalled content.

Enter the web folio URL in the address bar, press Enter, and click the x icon (or printing the Esc key) as soon equally you see some text on the screen.

A major limitation is that stopping the website may not load all content elements, particularly multimedia files like images, animations, videos, etc.

We should mention that the success of this technique depends on the order in which the website loads the page elements. For example, if the website loads the paywall earlier the content, this trick has little to no chance of success.

2. Delete the Page Cookies

Many websites store cookies on your browser to track your activities, including how much content you've accessed. Web log publishers can rail the number of (free) articles yous read using cookies stored on your browser. If you've hit the free article limit allotted to non-subscribers, deleting the website's cookies on your browser can reset the limit.

Head to the Privacy or Security department of your web browser and select the option that allows you to check the cookies and site data for all websites. Side by side, search for the website in your browser's cookies management page and click Remove All.

This applies to Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox. Meet this tutorial on immigration cache on any web browser for detailed steps.

This trick may not work on websites with hard paywalls—a proficient instance is Medium. For soft paywalls, yous'll also accept to manually delete the cookies every time you hit the gratis commodity limit.

One more than thing: This technique won't yield the desired effect if the publisher is using other avant-garde tools (non just cookies) to track your activity. These technologies include IP address, Browser Fingerprinting, WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication), etc.

three. Try the Incognito Way Hack

As explained before, not all paywalls are congenital the same. If the website uses a soft paywall, yous might exist able to read subscription-based content through incognito or individual browsing. That'll trick the website into believing that y'all're a new company, thereby granting you access to costless content before loading the paywall.

This technique is a lot meliorate than manually deleting the website'southward cookies. That's because most spider web browsers don't transmit pre-existing cookies to the website you lot visit in incognito mode. Although the website volition temporarily eolith new cookies on your device during private browsing sessions, they're removed when you lot close the incognito window.

Press Ctrl + Shift + N (or Control + Shift + N on macOS) to open an incognito tab in Google Chrome and Microsoft Border.

For Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer, the shortcut to launch a private browsing window is Ctrl + Shift + P  (or Control + Shift + P on macOS).

If yous use Safari, printing Command + Shift + Northward to open a individual browsing window and visit the paywalled webpage.

4. Use Annal Websites as a Backdoor

At that place are cyberspace archiving tools that preserve copies of web pages and social media posts for reference purposes. You can use these tools to access paywalled content and read subscription-based news articles for gratis—Annal.is, Archive.today, and Archive.ph are reliable options.

Visit the archive website in your browser, enter the webpage URL in the designated dialog box and select Save.

The tools to a higher place have a "Screenshot" tool that converts the webpage to a PNG image. Click the Screenshot option at the top of the consequence page to convert the page to an epitome file.

five. Use Paywall Removal Extensions

There are third-party browser extensions that help you read subscription-based newspaper articles for free. We tried a couple of these extensions and discovered that almost of them don't work. The ones that do aren't hosted on the Chrome Webstore, and then you'll have to source them from third-party platforms.

We've done the heavy-lifting and found this "Bypass Paywalls" extension for Chrome and Firefox to be effective. This extension lets you lot read subscription-based articles on hundreds of publications like The New York Times, Wired, The Wall Street Periodical, The Washington Post, etc. Plus, it's gratuitous–but yous'll have to manually load the extension on your browser.

  1. The extension is hosted on GitHub, so caput to the GitHub page and download the extension's Goose egg file.
  1. Extract the file to any location on your PC.
  1. Launch Chrome and paste chrome://extensions in the address bar and press Enter.
  2. Toggle on Programmer mode.
  1. Click Load unpacked.
  1. Navigate to the folder you extracted in stride #ii, select the extension folder, and click the Select Folder button.
  1. In the "Supported Sites" tab, check the Select all/none option to select all preloaded websites.

If a publication isn't on the list of preloaded websites, caput to the "Custom Sites" tab and manually enter the site's URL.

You can add as many websites as you want, 1 site/URL per line. Note that you cannot use the "Custom Sites" characteristic on Mozilla Firefox.

  1. Scroll to the lesser of the window and select Relieve.

Visit the website or reload the web page, and you should no longer encounter a paywall.

Pay for Quality Content and Journalism

Once again, the tutorial is purely advisory. Nosotros are potent advocates of paying for quality content. Contact the website ambassador if you're having difficulties paying for locked content. Employ these tricks only if efforts to make payments or contact the site admin bear witness futile.

Annotation that the techniques mentioned above and tools worked perfectly at the fourth dimension of publishing this commodity. Some won't work on certain websites depending on the type of paywall employed by the publisher. That said, we cannot guarantee that these tools volition forever grant you a free pass to read subscription-based content. Outline.com, for instance, used to be a useful tool for bypassing paywalls. Now, it no longer works for Wall Street Journal and New York Times articles.