If you have a website you visit frequently — and who doesn’t? — then you might like to have quicker access to that site. You might appreciate an icon on your iPhone’s home screen that you can tap to launch that site, just like you’d launch an app.
In this article, i’ll explain how to add a bookmark to your iPhone home screen. And if you already know how to do this, check out the post anyway. There are a couple of neat extra tricks in there.
How to add a website bookmark to your iPhone home screen
To add a website bookmark to your home screen, open up the site in Safari, and tap the share arrow. Then find the Add to home screen button and tap it. You’ll see the following screen, where you can edit the name of the bookmark. Pick something short so you can see it all in the small icon label. Tap Add to add it. Now, swipe up from the bottom edge of the screen to return to the home screen (or press the home button if you’ve got an older iPhone that still has one). You’ll see a new icon, which can be tapped to take you straight back to the site.
Two kinds of home-screen bookmark
In iOS 26, when you tap this icon, it loads as if it were an app by default. Safari does not launch. Instead, your new web-app gets its own web-view, and it can even use local iPhone storage to save its data, so that the app can work offline, too. There’s also a second kind: a plain bookmark that opens the page in Safari, the way most home-screen sites behaved before.
You’re in control of this now. When you tap Add to home screen, you’ll see an Open as Web App toggle — leave it on for the app-style behavior, or switch it off to get a plain bookmark that opens in Safari. One site that uses it, if you want to experiment, is called Paperback, and it’s used for reading websites saved in Pinboard, like a kind of more-private Instapaper.
Search and folders
One advantage of adding your bookmarks like this is that they show up in Spotlight searches (although regular bookmarks also show up in search, these are a lot easier to spot). And even better, if the site is saved as an offline web-app, it also shows up in the ⌘-Tab app switcher if you have a keyboard attached to your iPhone or iPad.
Custom icons
Sometimes, a website’s designer hasn’t bothered to provide an icon for the site, and so Safari has nothing to use as a home screen icon. In this case, iOS takes a screenshot of the page and turns that into an icon which is pretty much always as fugly as hizzle. One neat workaround for this is to zoom in on something on the webpage before saving it as a home screen bookmark. Then, when iOS snaps the screenshot, it uses that zoomed in page element instead. Bonus tip: Switch Safari to Reader View first in order to get nice clean, large, screen-filling images.
