Imagine some with a subscription shares an article on Facebook, but his friends can’t read it because of the paywall. Some websites unlock paywalls when people come from social media websites. Pro Tip: if you can’t find the article based on the title, add the domain to search “ site:” Doing this in the incognito mode can help too. Try copying the article title into Google search and open it from Google.
This is obviously suboptimal for the website’s reputation and SEO, so webmasters often make exceptions for visitors coming directly from Google. Imagine someone goes to Google, clicks on the first search result, and then bounces right away because of a paywall. Google ranks articles based on engagement these days. Cookie Remover is a great extension to do exactly that. You can usually bypass those paywalls by removing those cookies. Websites with metered paywalls use cookies to keep track of how many articles you open. You can read a few articles but then need to subscribe to see more content. Some websites like Medium have metered paywalls. To open an incognito window with a shortcut, press Shift + Command + N. And thus, you can often just open a paywalled article in the incognito mode to remove the paywall. In the incognito mode, cookies are cleared and disabled. Here are a few additional methods to try. Now, here come the extensions to bypass a paywall.īeyond browser extensions, there are other ways to bypass a paywall.
Soft paywall extensions take down the curtain or extract the content from the article’s HTML, whereas hard paywalls pretend to be a robot. So these extensions use different approaches to bypass paywalls. Websites with a hard paywall, on the other hand, don’t load any content until verifying that you are a subscriber. A website with a soft paywall loads the entire article into the browser and then puts a curtain over the content by visually abstracting it with a popup or an overlay. Paywalls come in two types - soft and hard. To learn more about paywalls and how they work, check out our complete guide to bypassing paywalls.īefore we dive into the extensions themselves, here is a drill down on paywalls. If a paywall can be bypassed, these extensions will help you do it. In this article, you will learn about the best Chrome extensions to bypass a paywall. The internet is no longer as free as you once thought.
So you’ve been surfing the web, exploring the vastness of the internet.