How to Block News Websites on Chrome
Refreshing the news feels responsible, but checking every hour rarely tells you anything new. Redirect, the Chrome extension, lets you block the news sites you refresh most and read them on your own schedule.
By Monish Meher · Updated
Block News sites in under a minute
- 1
Install Redirect
Add Redirect to Chrome from the Chrome Web Store. Blocking one site is free and needs no account.
- 2
Add a rule
Open the dashboard, choose whole site and enter
cnn.com - 3
Choose how pauses work
Pick pause lengths and a task to finish first. Breathe. News checking is often anxiety driven, and a breathing cycle helps with both.
Why News sites are hard to put down
News sites compete for your click, and negativity tends to win it. A study in Nature Human Behaviour analyzed about 105,000 headline variations tested on Upworthy and found that, for a headline of average length, each additional negative word raised the click-through rate by 2.3 percent. Add live blogs that update by the minute, breaking news banners and an endless list of related stories, and refreshing starts to feel like staying informed. Most checks turn up nothing that changes your day, but the chance of something big keeps pulling you back, which is how an hour of work turns into an hour of headlines.
A news routine instead of constant checking#
- Add a rule for each news site you refresh most. Two or three usually cover most of the habit.
- Give every rule the same schedule, leaving a morning and an evening window open, for example blocking from 09:00 to 18:00 on weekdays.
- Point the rules at a custom URL, like one weekly digest or newsletter archive you trust, so the urge to check leads somewhere calmer.
- Choose the breathing pause as the pause task, with a 5 minute pause length for the moments that really cannot wait.
- Add rules for X and Reddit as well, since news checking often moves there once news sites are blocked.
After a few days, look at your redirect count on the Focus page. Seeing how often you reached for the news, and how little changed in between, is often the most useful part.
Make it stick
- Add one rule per news site you check most, like cnn.com, bbc.com or nytimes.com.
- Use a schedule that leaves a morning and evening window free for reading the news.
- Point these rules at a custom URL, like a weekly news digest you trust, instead of the Focus dashboard.
cnn.comBlockingBreathe. News checking is often anxiety driven, and a breathing cycle helps with both.
Questions about blocking News sites
Can I block many news sites at once?
Add a rule for each site. Rules take a few seconds to add, and you can export them to a backup file and share the list.
Can I still open a news article someone sends me?
Yes, with a short pause, or wait for your reading window if the schedule is about to open. If the article is on a site you rarely visit and have not added a rule for, it opens normally. Many people keep one or two in-depth sources unblocked and only block the sites they refresh.
Will blocking the news make me miss something important?
Very rarely. Genuinely urgent news tends to reach you through people, messages or alerts on your phone anyway. A schedule with a morning and evening window keeps you informed at a set time, and the breathing pause is there when checking feels urgent in the moment.
Does this block news on Google News or social media?
Only the sites you add a rule for. If you read headlines on news.google.com, or news reaches you through X or Reddit, add rules for those too. Blocking only news sites often moves the habit to a feed, so it helps to cover the two or three places you actually refresh.
Go deeper
The full guides behind this setup.
How to Stop Doomscrolling (When Willpower Keeps Losing)
Endless feeds are built so there is never a natural place to stop. The fix is to put stopping points back in, on purpose.
Read the guide →How to Block Websites During Work Hours in Chrome
Block distracting sites while you work and get them back when you are done. A step by step schedule setup for Chrome, with a sample week you can copy.
Read the guide →Sources
- Robertson et al., Negativity drives online news consumption, Nature Human Behaviour (2023) (checked September 2026)
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