Two Ways To Bypass Website Paywalls on Desktop

If you have ever read an article on a website such as Forbes.com, you’ll notice that they limit the number of articles you can read for free. After you pass their specified threshold, which could be four or five articles, the website will prevent you from reading any more. This can be frustrating for many people.

If you religiously read a website’s articles, you may be tempted to pay their subscription. There are a couple of ways that you can bypass the paywall, however. One is just a temporary workaround that you probably wouldn’t want to use all the time, while the other is a more permanent solution.

Disclaimer: If a website requires a subscription even to view the website, meaning you don’t get a free trial, the tips below will not help you. These tips are for websites that let you consume content for free before blasting you with a paywall.

Websites that prevent you from reading a certain number of articles for free have to use something to track it. The only way for them to do that is by using cookies. Opening an incognito window results in a clean slate — an “anonymous” way to interact with the internet. “Anonymous” is in quotes since browsers and websites can still track you while the incognito window is open, but it all gets reset once you close it. So privacy is not a feature of incognito, as some people may believe.

As stated previously, websites can still track you with cookies while the incognito window is open, meaning you will have to close the window entirely if you want the cookies to reset. Because of this, incognito windows are perhaps not the best option for those who want free access to a website regularly.

If you don’t want to go through the hassle of opening an incognito window every time you want to read an article on a website, then there is a more convenient alternative. I will be breaking down how to block specific websites from using cookies on three of the major web browsers — Chrome, Safari and Firefox.

Start by opening Chrome (on either Mac or Windows) and follow the steps below:

The “[*.]” part is important when entering the address since that tells Chrome that it needs to block cookies for the entire site, not just a subdomain within the site. If you wanted to block cookies here on Medium, for example, simply typing “medium.com” in that field would not do anything.

If you just want to block cookies on one specific subdomain, such as drive.google.com rather than google.com as a whole, you can just type in “drive.google.com.”

In addition, you can also type in IP addresses that don’t necessarily start with “http://.”

Unfortunately, there is no native way to block cookies from specific websites in Safari. It allows users to block cookies on all websites, but not specific ones. If you want to block cookies on all websites, then follow the steps below:

Block All Cookies in Safari

Blocking cookies on all websites may be an attractive feature for the particularly privacy-focused people in the world. However, these are undoubtedly a minority of people.

Automatically Block Cookies on Specific Websites

Manually Delete Cookies on Websites

Although there is no native option to block cookies on websites automatically, you can manually delete them whenever you want. Open Safari preferences, click on “Privacy and security,” select “Manage website data,” choose the websites which you want to delete cookies and click “Remove.”

This is perhaps not a convenient workaround, but it gets the job done without paying for an extension.

The process of blocking cookies on websites on Firefox is quite similar to that of Chrome. Just follow the steps below:

Be sure to type in the full website address, including “https://,” when typing in the URL.

Besides paywalls, many other reasons could compel somebody to block cookies on a website. Some websites may require you to create an account after using their website for multiple visits, which can be inconvenient. Whatever the case may be, I hope these tips have helped you sidestep website blockades.

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