The best way to bypass an article’s paywall

The era of the free internet is long over: As the online advertising market has collapsed in recent years, thanks in large part to changes Google made to AI reviews, countless websites have added paywalls. This means that if you want to read their articles, you need to register and pay a monthly subscription fee. Some sites have a “metered” paywall—meaning you can read a certain number of articles for free before they ask for money—while others have a hard paywall where you have to pay to read even one article.

Paywalls are mostly common for news websites, mainly because relying on advertising revenue alone is no longer a viable strategy, forcing these companies to look for direct revenue sources such as monthly subscriptions. In that sense, paywalls aren’t a bad thing: supporting journalism you find valuable is a great thing. Anyway, I hope you support the websites you read regularly, especially your local news outlet.

But sometimes you just need to get past the paywall quickly. Perhaps you lost your password, didn’t save it on your phone, are in a hurry, or you’re low on money and you swore to yourself that you’ll sign up later. If one of these exceptions applies, there are many ways to bypass Internet paywalls, although not as many as before.

Many once-reliable paywall bypass methods have almost completely stopped working (pour one for pasting a title into Google and opening the link in a private browsing window). The methods discussed below are more reliable and therefore more likely to work. I’ll start with my favorite that has served me well over the past few years. But a word of caution: You may be able to successfully use one of these methods today, but that may change in the future as websites restrict circumvention methods. (This article is updated regularly as some methods stop working and others become available.)

Archive.today is the best and most reliable option to bypass paywalls.

Photo: Screenshot by Joel Cunningham

Archive.today is the fastest, most reliable way to bypass paywalls I’ve found, and I’ve used it successfully for years on a variety of sites, even as other options have come and gone. This is a site that will create an archived version of any website you paste into the search bar. (Think of the archived version as a time-stamped screenshot of any website—a self-described “time capsule,” if you will.) Archive.today “saves text and graphical copy of the page for greater accuracy,” and gives you a short link to the immutable record of any web page. Yes, yes, but as a bonus, you can often use this feature to bypass paywalls and read the entire paywalled article without any problems.

Simply paste the link to your article into the black “I want to search my archived photos” bar and you’ll be taken to a page where you can view older archived versions. If the article you’re trying to crawl isn’t already archived, put the URL in the red “My URL is active and I want to archive its contents” bar. The site will then begin to create an archived version, which usually only takes a few minutes. You’ll be directed directly to this archived version as soon as it’s ready, and you can return to it later by copying the new URL from your browser’s navigation bar.

You can also add a browser extension to Chrome that will create a button in your browser’s toolbar that you can click to instantly take an archived snapshot of any webpage. The archived version will even automatically open in a new tab.

This site has only failed me once or twice. There’s usually an archived version of everything I want to read, but it only takes a minute or two to create a new one. Unfortunately, I don’t always like it (even aside from the fact that I prefer to pay for my news when I can): in recent months, the site and its associated mirrors (including archive.is and archive.ph) have been involved in a widespread phishing attack, prompting Wikipedia to ban citations of its links.

Ghost Archive is a more reliable but less secure alternative.

Ghost Archive is another site that operates similarly to Archive.today, minus (some) ethical considerations. It’s worth a try if the first one is offline or you don’t want to use it for other reasons. It has the same interface where you can search for archived articles or request that a new archived version be created. In my testing, I found that it’s not as good at getting around the more stubborn paywalls, and because it’s less popular, you’re less likely to find that the page you’re trying to access is already archived for you, but it’s a decent backup.

Another free, simple AI alternative to bypass paywalls.

A new tool I found while poking around Reddit to get around the paywall, smry.ai is a tool that works similar to Archive.today in that it shows you a cached version of the article page (derived, according to the developer, from either the Internet Wayback Machine or Google’s cache), allowing you to read it in its entirety. What sets this article apart is its AI integration: Click the purple “Create” button on the results page to get an AI-generated summary of the article’s key points. In practice, I’ve found the summary to be more like a social media post than an outline (for example, a 7,000-word New York Magazine article about recent attempts on President Donald Trump’s life was condensed down to one short paragraph), but if you’re just looking for the gist or trying to decide whether you even want to read the whole article, this is a nice little addition.

More sophisticated solutions to your paywall problems

If you want to try solutions that are a little more technical than simple copy and paste, one of these options may be right for you.

Disable JavaScript in your browser

Some websites use JavaScript to hide content behind paywalls, and you can bypass these blocks by disabling JavaScript in your browser. Please note that disabling JavaScript can (and will) break most websites: some may not allow you to view comments, and others may not load at all. But it’s worth a try if you just want to read the content of the post.

Ideally, you should use a separate browser for this so that you don’t have to constantly turn JavaScript on and off. Once you’ve chosen a secondary browser, check out our guide to disabling JavaScript in different browsers.

Use a VPN

Some paywalled sites, such as The Washington Post, will allow you to read a limited number of articles for free each month, then close the wall once you reach the limit. You can use a VPN to change your IP address and trick a site into giving you more free services. This method won’t help you on sites that don’t offer free access, but it’s worth a try and will work with both paid and free VPNs.

Edit a couple of elements on a web page.

If you know a little about HTML and CSS, you can edit elements using the browser to bypass some of the paywall restrictions. Essentially, you edit the page to remove banners that block subscription content. It’s a lot like opening the curtains and revealing a beautiful view from the window.

It works with some websites, but others have added a hard lock that only shows the article if you’re logged in with a paid account. However, it’s worth trying once and checking if it works:

On any website, right-click the banner just below the last visible sentence of the article and select Inspect the element. This will open a console where you can find the offending items and hide or change them. The exact element varies from site to site, but it is often labeled as display, paid accessor subscribe. Here’s a nifty GIF on Reddit that shows how to do it.

Use a shortcut to bypass paywalls on Android

If you’re trying to read a paywalled article on an Android phone, you can bypass it using the Bypass Paywalls Clean browser extension. This extension was previously available for Firefox, but has been removed from the Mozilla store. However, you can add it to another browser; Reddit users recommend trying the Kiwi browser.

Use a paywall bypass shortcut on iPhone

The last method on our list only works on iPhone: Apple’s free Shortcuts app lets you run automation routines on your iPhone, and its tools are used to bypass paywalls on various websites. There are many such shortcuts, and they may not all work with all websites. Start by trying to bypass Paywall or Unpaywall.

Two completely legal and ethical ways to bypass paywalls

Check if your local library provides access

Many libraries offer access to paid subscriptions to magazines and newspapers online. Typically, you will have to go to your library’s website, log in using your card number or account details, and then access various publications indirectly through the library portal. (For example, if you live in Marin County, California, you can easily read the Washington Post for free.)

There are too many library systems to count, so you may or may not be lucky enough to end up with one that offers this bonus, but it’s worth a try; since the library pays for the publication as a service, you don’t even have to feel guilty. (Not sure if your system has a news portal? Ask your local librarian!)

Ask your subscriber for a “gift article”

This isn’t likely to be feasible often, but it’s worth a try when you’re trying to read one paid article that goes viral: many publications allow paid subscribers to “gift” a copy of a certain number of articles each month (The Washington Post And New York Times each allows you to donate, for example, 10 articles per month). If you know your aunt subscribes to the New York Times, it doesn’t hurt to ask if she’s willing to give you reading gifts from time to time.