Many good news websites often keep their articles behind a paywall, and for a good reason. However, not everyone looking to read up a story has the means or wants to spend money just to read a single article.
In this article, we’re taking a look at a few different ways you can use to access news articles for free.
Accessing news articles free of cost
Here are some methods you can try out to access news articles for free.
Use incognito mode
Not all paywalls are the same and the same applies to sites. If a site uses rather basic tracking methods to ensure viewers see a paywall, you can try using incognito mode in your browser to try and get around the paywall.
Also read: 15 useful Chrome extensions to get the most out of your browser
Stop loading the page
One quick and straightforward way of accessing articles behind a paywall is to simply stop loading the page as soon as the text content appears. This method won’t work for every website, but it’s dead simple to try and won’t require disabling anything or downloading any extensions.
Delete the site cookies
Websites use cookies stored in your browser to track your activity. If you’ve visited a page a number of times in a day, it’ll know when to put up a paywall thanks to these cookies.
You can, however, delete them from your browser and access the content again. Here’s how.
Step 1: Type in chrome://settings/clearBrowserData in your browser’s address bar and hit Enter.

Step 2: Select the cache and cookies options and make sure the Time range is set to All time. Click on the Clear now button to clear out all the data.

Now try accessing the site again, and you should be able to access the news article for free.Â
Use a Paywall removing extension
Another nifty and effortless way of removing paywalls on a website is to simply use a browser extension. If you’re on Edge, Chrome or any other Chromium-based browser, we recommended trying out either Bypass Paywall or Outliner to get rid of paywalls as soon as you open a site.Â
Use a web archiving tool
Web archiving tools like the Wayback Machine keep crawling the internet and archiving pages for future use. You can use these services as a backdoor onto the website and access the content for free. All you have to do is head over to either Wayback Machine or any other archival tool of your choice and search for the article’s headline.

Also read: What does the WPS button on the router do?
Try a Facebook redirect
Some paywalled websites let users coming from Facebook access their articles for free. You can try this out yourself by adding https://facebook.com/l.php?u=Â before the site’s URL to see if that gets you past the paywall.Â
Disable Javascript
A lot of paywalled sites (and websites in general) use Javascript to control how the page appears in a browser on the client side. If that’s the case, disabling Javascript in your browser will get you easy access to the page’s contents.
Step 1: Head to Chrome’s Javascript settings. You can access them directly at chrome://settings/content/javascript.

Step 2: Under Default behaviour, ensure that Don’t allow sites to use Javascript is enabled.

Now try refreshing the page and the paywall should be gone. You should now be able to access news articles for free.
Check the page’s code
If none of the methods above work, you can select what little content you see on a page, right-click it and select Inspect Element. This will show you the page’s source code, and you should be able to extract the entire article from here.

This method does require basic know-how of HTML. However, with a bit of knowledge, you can beat the paywall on most sites, which will be helpful to access news articles for free.
Also read:Â How to hard refresh Chrome and other web browsers?