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Cycling News

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Cyclingnews

Cycling Buyer's Guides: buying advice for all areas of your ride

Cyclingnews Josh Croxton Tom Wieckowski Will Jones Sam Gupta Zwift

A man riding a Pinarello bike in the wind tunnel .

Cyclingnews is committed to providing our readers with the absolute best advice when it comes to cycling tech and gear. Whether you're looking for a brand new aero road bike, a bikepacking-friendly gravel bike, a new helmet or a torque wrench to keep everything working, we're dedicated to putting our team's experience to good use and provide tips, tricks, and genuine cyclist-to-cyclist buying advice to help you choose the right one.

Our experienced team of testers and writers are using, evaluating and testing everything from entry-level products to pro-level equipment to provide you with an informed buying decision.

We will test all the latest products as they are launched, pitting them against the competition to help you decide whether or not they are worth your hard-earned investment.

Choosing the right product can be overwhelming

Whether you recently got into cycling or you've been at it for years, the sheer array of accessories can be dizzying, from the basics such as the bike, helmet and shoes, to the more seasonal products like clothing.

On any given morning, you'll ask yourself do you need a short-sleeve jersey and arm warmers or a long-sleeve jersey? Do you need a gilet, a base layer, a softshell or a hardshell? Should you wear shorts and leg warmers, or maybe just knee warmers, or full bib tights? Is it an overshoes kind of day too?

And that's all before you get into choosing which GPS computer, which tyres, which saddle and which handlebar tape you want on your bike. Each of these different accessories comes with a long list of brands making what they claim to be the best, and you could spend weeks trawling through websites to find the best product at the best price, before moving on to the next.

Alternatively, you could use our help. We've been there, we've got the t-shirt (and the arm warmers), and each of our buying guides is designed to consider the needs of various cyclists and align a product with those needs. If you're an aspiring road racer, your wishlist of features in a new helmet is likely different to someone using it exclusively to commute to the office.

Best bike buyer's guides

Will Jones takes his job as bike tester very seriously (Image credit: Josh Croxton)

If you're looking for a new bike, we've put a number of bikes to the test, compared the differences, and done the research so you don't have to. Here are a number of guides tailored to help you choose the best when searching for your new bike.

Clothing

Shoes

Helmets

Accessories and components

Whether you're looking to freshen up your bar tape, overhaul your groupset, or invest in an indoor training setup, our buyer's guides for accessories and components are here to help.

Maintenance

(Image credit: Future / Tom Wieckowski )

If you're a fettler who likes to maintain your own bike, there's no such thing as too many tools, so keep your bike in tip-top condition with our range of maintenance-related guides.

Groupsets

Wheels

Record your ride: Computers and cameras

Power meters and indoor training

Here at Cyclingnews, we're not only interested in sharing helpful buying advice but also in suggesting and recommending products we've tested. We also want to help you find the best price available on those very products, so we will regularly share information about deals we've spotted so that you can take advantage.

Who are we?

The Cyclingnews tech team comprises myself (Josh Croxton), Will Jones and Tom Wieckowski, as well as some support from a handful of freelance writers.

Click on our names to head to our author profiles and find out more about our roles, our backgrounds and our areas of expertise.

Why do we do it?

Although we really rather enjoy spending our days writing about cycling kit, there's a financial motivation too - we've all got bills to pay, after all!

There are three ways we monetise our buying advice.

1. Third-party advertising

These are the ads that show up around our guides. Our editorial team have no real say in what lands in these ad slots (though we can flag offensive ads). Our focus remains on creating good content, because the more people that read the guide, the more people see these adverts and our bosses remain happy.

2. First-party advertising

Our publishing house (Future Publishing) has a team which sells advertising opportunities directly to brands across a single page (such as the homepage), a category of pages (such as all gravel-based content), or just 'everywhere'. I'm sure there are more nuances to the categorisation, but as the Associate Editor here, I needn't be involved.

Editorially, our focus here is to make our buying guides (and other content) as good as possible. In the case of buying guides, the better and more helpful it is, the more likely it is that people will return for their next purchase. Once again, the more people we engage, the more people that see those adverts, and the greater the likelihood that the brand in question will return to advertise again.

Once again, as editors we have no say in what adverts show up, but more pertinently, advertisers have no say on which products we recommend, nor how well a product is reviewed. That decision remains squarely on the shoulders of our tech team.

3. Affiliate links

As a small cog within a larger publishing-house machine, Cyclingnews has access to a piece of software called Hawk. This software is essentially a database that pulls in product data from live feeds at thousands of eCommerce websites around the world, from the big ones like Amazon and Walmart to the cycling-specific ones like Sigma Sports and Competitive Cyclist.

Once we've decided that a product is worthy of a place in a buying guide, we can create a product in Hawk. Once I've created that product, the software will search for every instance of it available for sale in its database, using the title, barcode, SKU and other identifiers. It will then compile them into a list, and order it with the cheapest in-stock option at the top. We will then create a 'widget' and drop it into the buying guide, and that's where you see the green 'buy it at...' buttons.

When you click on that link, your browser's cookies track the click and if you go on to make a purchase, the retailer will pay us a small commission to say thanks for the sale. Once again, this doesn't affect which products we recommend, because you can buy everything online these days!

Why you can trust Cyclingnews

Our loyalty is to our readers because without you, we wouldn't have a job.

That loyalty extends throughout all of our content, from our race news coverage to our premium content, but especially in our buying guides and deals roundups. The products we recommend are there because we have tried them, liked them and think you will too.

The guides we choose to write are based on search data from Google and elsewhere. The reason we haven't written a guide to the best aero leg warmers is because our data tells us nobody wants to read that. However, we know that thousands of people search for best road bike helmet and that's why that exists.

The same rings true with reviews too. We test thousands of products when compiling our buying guides, and as such we can't write reviews for all of them. Instead, we prioritise reviewing the products that our readers are searching for, however, we do occasionally write about products that we believe will be interesting to our readers. Will's recent review of some head-up-display glasses springs to mind here.

You can also learn more about how we test cycling products.

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