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How to Open Blocked Sites at School, Work, or Nationally

If you want to learn how to open blocked websites wherever you are, you have to realize that there are two basic ways to do it. The first way will work 99% of the time. The second ‘way’ encompasses a variety of tactics that are very hit or miss. Let’s look at how to open blocked websites right now.

The best way to open blocked websites

Most of the time, all that you are going to need to open block websites is a VPN. There are two basic ways why a website cannot be opened:

  1. It is being blocked by your local network and your administrator. Your ISP can also block your access. Both are going to prevent a website from been opened by monitoring your traffic.
  2. The website is being prevented from being opened by the website itself. The website is doing this by reading your IP address and determining that you are in a location where it has restricted the access.

Both of these can be solved by the VPN. Let’s look at how it will do it:

  1. In the first instance, it will encrypt your traffic. Your local network (or your ISP) will not be able to see where you are going and won’t prevent you from opening the website.
  2. If the website itself is blocking you based on your location, you can choose a VPN server that will allow you to access it. For example, you can choose a VPN server in England to access the BBC iPlayer. Our suggestions for geo-blocking VPNs are a good bet here.

This is how to open blocked websites in both instances.

Open blocked sites with a VPN

Using a VPN to open blocked websites is quite easy. Here are the steps to follow:

  • Choose a VPN provider that has a lot of VPN servers around the world. I recommend IPVanish for its top quality, and it has a wide variety of servers.
  • Download the software of the VPN provider.
  • Determine if you need to connect to a particular server or if any server will do. You may need to troubleshoot a little, but you will get it right.
  • Connect to the appropriate server.

That’s it. You will now be able to open blocked sites whenever you need to. Some exceptions may apply when you’re in China; the Great Firewall of China is incredibly powerful at blocking sites.

How to open blocked sites: alternative methods

These are other ways to open blocked websites, but they’re not anywhere near as foolproof as a VPN. Most of them will only work some of the time, with your ISP or local network picking up on these tactics. If you can’t afford a VPN, even with one as cheap as Private Internet Access at three dollars per month, try these alternative methods:

  • Proxy websites: You can use a proxy website as a buffer between yourself and the website you actually want but is blocked. However, any smart network administrator can prevent this from working.
  • Google Translate: Do you know another language? You can use Google Translate here. The trick is that when you translate the website and the site goes into another language, Google Translate acts as a sort of proxy website.
  • IP address: In some cases, administrators simply have a list of URLs which are blocked. You can get around this by going to ping.domain.com and finding the IP address of the website instead of the URL. However, if the website itself has hidden its IP, this method will not work.
  • HTML: This relates to website URLs being blocked and some admins not blocking the HTTPS version of a site. It can work, but…

https://twitter.com/Chicken_Inferno/status/891914534876852224

  • Browser extensions: This will work at the local level, but there are extensions such as ProxMate and Hola that you can add to your browser. This will typically work only for Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube.
  • Internet Archive: The Internet Archive, or Wayback Machine, is a website which stores older versions of sites. You could use it to look at past versions of websites.
  • RSS feed: It can be a bit difficult to learn how to open block sites using this tactic if the site doesn’t have an RSS feed. If it does, simply add it to your RSS feed reader. If it doesn’t, you will need to learn how to set one up. Note that this is not very convenient for doing any sort of research as you partly have to do this in advance.

These are other ways that you can learn how to open blocked sites at school, work, or those blocked on the national level. For those websites that are self-blocked by the websites themselves, none of these will work. Geo restrictions are very real, and the only real option is a VPN provider.

Indeed.

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