How to add web page shortcut icons to your iPhone’s Home Screen

Updated November 1st, 2022.

You can add shortcut icons for web pages to your iPhone’s Home Screen. They look just like app icons, and when you tap them, they take you to a web page. Do this for the web pages you visit the most and you’ll save a ton of time.

It’s easy as 1-2-3. Here’s how you do it.

Start by going to the website in question. Here’s one I like a lot.

The magic is hidden behind the Share button, at the bottom of the screen on an iPhone, so tap that. (On an iPad it’s at the top right of the screen.)

You get the standard sharing options: shortcuts for send a link to the page to people you’ve shared a lot of items with, and buttons to share via Mail, Messages, etc. There’s nothing about “Add a shortcut to the Home Screen.”

It doesn’t look like we’re in the right place, does it. (Spoiler alert: we are in the right place.)

Here’s the trick: you need to scroll down. Push the Share sheet up so you can see what’s below. When you do that, you see this:

There it is: “Add to Home Screen.” Tap that.

Now you see this:

From here, all you do is tap “Add” at top right and voilá! The icon appears on your Home Screen.

You might have to scroll through a few of your Home Screens before you find the icon but it will be there somewhere. You can move it later, just like any other icon on your iPhone.

Here’s how it looks:

Technically you’re done, but in this case the name of the website is too long to fit under the icon properly. It’s just cosmetic but let’s fix it. You can’t change the name after making the icon– you have to do before you tap “Add.”

So let’s do it again.

Go back to the web page (you can tap your shortcut to do it). Tap the Share button. Scroll down. Tap “Add to Home Screen.” This time, edit the name that you’d like to see under the icon.

Here I’ve renamed the overly-long “Mac and iPhone training and troubleshooting for individuals and businesses” to “cboyce.”

When you’re done editing, tap “Add” and you’ll see a new icon with the new name.

I left the original icon on the Home Screen so we could compare them side by side, and now that we see that the second one is much better, let’s remove the first one. We do this by tapping and holding on the icon we want to get rid of.

Tap “Delete Bookmark” and you’re done. Well, almost done: you still have to confirm that you want to delete the shortcut.

Now you’re done.

From now on, you’re one tap away from visiting that favorite site.

I have icons for a handful of sites on my iPhone and they save me gobs of time. Take a minute now to set up a few of these and start saving time today!

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