The Royal Navy had several plans to bring the war to the High Seas Fleet, either by seizing an offshore island and forcing an action, or through attacks from the air or by torpedo boats. None of these plans came to fruition, largely due to a lack of available resources. Using the Grand Fleet to directly attack the High Seas Fleet was not considered.

Attacking the bases of the enemy fleet had been a major part of the RN's strategic thinking in the latter half of the 19th Century. It built a large force of short-ranged, well-armed 'coastal-defence' battleships, which were largely intended to assault French harbours like Cherbourg. By the 1900s, though, attacks on the enemy's bases were seen as no longer being feasible. This was down to new technological developments, with the main ones being mines and torpedoes. Most warships had limited underwater protection, so these weapons posed a significant threat to even the largest battleships of the era. They were largely defensive weapons, being deployed by small, short-ranged craft. They were cheap and easy to produce, compared to a battleship, and so could easily be deployed en masse. Nor could they easily be countered. Minefields could be swept, but this required you to find the minefield first, usually done by running a battleship straight into it. Torpedo boats could be countered by destroyers, and the secondary armament of battleships, though these would struggle against massed torpedo boats. However, submarines could not be effectively countered - it wasn't until 1916 that the first depth charges were developed, while effective detection systems had to wait until after WWI. Submarines were hard to use offensively; their top speed was little better than the cruise speed of the battlefleet, so they had to be deployed well in advance of any offensive moves by the battlefleet. In defence, where they had only a short distance to travel and no need to fit a strict timetable, they were in their element. Given these technological changes, an attack on an enemy naval base by a battlefleet was no longer seen as feasible. A battlefleet attempting it would suffer heavy casualties to flotillas of small, cheap craft, enough to outweigh any successful sinkings of the enemy's battleships.

Despite this, several in the Royal Navy pressed for offensive action against the German coast. These plans can be separated into two main genres. One focused on securing a forward base near Germany, with an amphibious landing against an island on the German coast. The Germans would be forced to attack this base, and therefore run afoul of the British flotillas, as well as the battlefleet. The other sought to use 'flotilla' craft against the German bases, with aircraft and torpedo boats being the main elements of these.

Plans for an amphibious landing were largely a feature of the early war. In 1913, Rear Admiral Lewis Bayly was tasked with producing a plan for the seizure of an advanced base somewhere near Germany. He settled on two targets for such an invasion; the German islands of Borkum and Sylt. He also developed what he thought was an amphibious doctrine suitable for the Dreadnought age, focussing on surprise, and putting as large a force as possible onto the beach. He drew up plans for the landing craft and monitors needed for such an attack. These plans were renewed in August 1914, despite the protests of Admiral Jellicoe. Other planners came up with plans for attacks on other islands. Admiral Arthur Wilson was a strong advocate for an attack on Heligoland, while Churchill favoured an attack on Borkum, though both were rejected by the rest of the Admiralty. Ultimately, Sylt was the target decided on. Work continued on producing forces for such an attack, with a provisional date for launch of the 1st of March 1915 (or 15th of April if work was delayed). The invasion of Gallipoli put paid to this scheme. Ships, men and materiel earmarked for the attack on Sylt were instead diverted to the Dardanelles. After this, plans for amphibious assaults were more focused on recovering the Belgian 'triangle ports' of Ostend, Zeebrugge and Bruges, which were bases for U-boats operating against the important British sea routes running into London.

The use of aircraft against an enemy fleet in harbour was not a new concept in the RN, with the first concept for it being developed by officers of the Royal Naval Air Service in 1911. In 1912, a Lieutenant Hyde-Thomson wrote a paper describing the possibility of attacking targets with torpedo-carrying aircraft; he was soon sent to the Torpedo School in Portsmouth, to develop a torpedo that could be carried by an aircraft. A prototype torpedo was dropped by Squadron Commander Arthur Longmore on the 28th July 1914. At the outset of the war, three fast Channel ferries were converted into seaplane carriers, intended for reconnaissance of the bases of the High Seas Fleet in preparation for a strike by aircraft. On Christmas Day 1914, the three carriers, Empress, Engadine and Riviera, moved into position off the German coast and launched nine aircraft against the Zeppelin base at Cuxhaven. The aircraft failed to locate the Zeppelin base, but one aircraft unsuccessfully attacked the German cruisers Stralsund and Graudenz and another reconnoitred the German anchorage at the Schillig Roads. Despite this moderate success, attacks on the High Seas Fleet were impossible until the RNAS had a true torpedo-carrying aircraft; this had to wait until the landplane Sopwith Cuckoo was developed in 1917. In September 1917, a plan was outlined for an attack on the German fleet by 121 aircraft, flying from eight carriers (three waves of 40 attack aircraft, plus an attack coordinator in an unarmed aircraft with extra fuel). Problems in supplying both aircraft and carriers led to a steady decrease in the size of the plan over the next year. By October 1918, it had shrunk to just 20 aircraft, launched from a single carrier, HMS Argus. The strike force was ready for the attack in early November 1918, but the Armistice agreement meant that it was never carried out. Argus' aircraft did get a chance to demonstrate their capability in 1919, when they carried out an exercise against the 2nd Battle Squadron in Portland Harbour; here, they scored six hits from eight torpedoes dropped.

The use of torpedo craft against enemy harbours had been considered in the 19th Century; the incredibly weird torpedo ram HMS Polyphemus of 1881 had been built for exactly this role. However, in WWI, the first serious suggestion that torpedo craft be used against the bases of the High Seas Fleet came in 1915. Three junior officers of the Harwich Force suggested that a small torpedo boat, carried on the davits of a light cruiser, would be useful for attacks on German bases. These could be deployed with little modification to the cruisers carrying them, could be deployed en masse (~20 boats), and pass over sand-banks and the like, allowing attacks from undefended quarters. The Admiralty approved, and one of the officers made arrangements with the boatbuilding company of Thornycroft to produce an experimental craft. The Admiralty would later bring these private arrangements into its own procurement processes, with twelve of these craft (designated Coastal Motor Boats or CMBs) being ordered. The 12 CMBs were ready in August 1916, and plans were put in place for what Admiral Tyrwhitt, commanding Harwich Force, called Operation 'MB'. This was an attack on Schillig Roads, with the boats attacking in the early hours of the morning, an hour and a half before sunrise. A rehearsal took place on the 9th September, with formal approval for the operation being given on the 17th. Preliminary aerial reconnaissance was carried out on the 21st-22nd October, but heavy fog meant that nothing was seen. As the RN had no clue what was present in the target, Operation 'MB' was postponed until the spring of 1917. In the interim, the CMBs were diverted to the Dover Patrol for operations in the Channel. They were heavily used here, and the need to refit them after this precluded operations in 1917. The light cruiser HMS Diamond was, however, converted into a specialist CMB carrier, with davits for six CMBs. The CMBs were used for several sweeps into the Heligoland Bight in the summer of 1918, with the addition of seaplanes carried on lighters. However, these sweeps were mainly targeting light forces in the area, rather than as attacks on German bases, with the total successes from six sweeps being one Zeppelin and one minesweeper.