It’s great to have website bookmarks, but what’s even better are desktop shortcuts right on your desktop. Here’s how to create website shortcuts and add them to your Mac desktop.
If there’s a website you visit frequently, or if it’s a website you visit first when you access your computer for In the morning, having a shortcut to a website right on your desktop is a convenient and easy way to access that website.
Again, you can bookmark it, but if your favorites list is getting Letting go a bit, creating desktop shortcuts can free up that long list a bit. Plus, it’s just one more click you don’t have to do.
For me, I have my bookmarks in sync on both my computers. However, one of my computers is primarily intended as a streaming machine. So I have a Netflix shortcut on my desktop, as well as an MLB.TV shortcut. I could bookmark them, but they’d also show up on my other computer, taking up space that wouldn’t otherwise have to be there.
Having these shortcuts on my desktop makes it really quick and easy to fire up a desktop program. TV or a movie and start watching without having to click through a bunch of nonsense. I digress, though.
Anyway, here’s how to create website shortcuts on Mac and add them to your desktop.
Add desktop shortcuts to websites on Mac
To add a website shortcut to your desktop in OS X, the process is fairly simple. Just follow these simple steps:
Open your web browser and navigate to the website you want as a desktop shortcut. Reduce the size of the web browser window a little so that you can see the desktop. To adjust the size of the window, simply hover over either edge, then click and drag your mouse.
Next, highlight the URL in the address bar, then click and drag the URL on the desktop. This will instantly create a desktop shortcut to that website.
You can then click the shortcut and press Enter to rename it to whatever you want.
If you see a .webloc after the name, it means you have extensions enabled in your system preferences. To change that and hide the file extensions, follow these steps:
Open a Finder window, then go up to the menu bar at the top left and click Finder > Preferences > Advanced.
There will be an option that says Show all file name extensions. Uncheck the box next to it and filename extensions will no longer appear in files.
Adding desktop shortcuts is a nifty little trick in OS X that not many users are aware of. In fact, you can do the same on iOS as well.
The process of saving a website shortcut to your iPhone’s home screen is really easy and takes about as long as saving a regular bookmark. Follow these simple steps:
- Open Safari on your iOS device.
- Navigate to the website you want to save as your home screen shortcut. In this case, we’re using GottaBeMobile.com (and you should too!).
- Tap the Share button in the menu bar. It’s an icon on the right side that’s a box with an arrow sticking out of it.
- Tap Add to Home Screen.
- On the next page you’ll give the shortcut a name and confirm the web address.
- After that, tap Add in the top right corner to add the shortcut to your home screen.
The icon will usually be the favicon of the website you are saving, but sometimes it will be something random, like you see on GottaBeMobile.com. It just depends on the website and how Safari reads it.
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