How Can I Add a Favorite Web Site to my Start Menu?

While there are millions upon millions of Web sites, it’s definitely the case that most people actually visit a half-dozen Web sites or less. Not only that, but most people visit the same handful of sites too. Make a rich and interesting site your home page and you might never leave on a typical day! Obviously having dozens of sites added to your Start Menu is going to end up being a bit confusing in the Windows 10 Start Menu world, but adding a few key sites? That’s a smart idea.

If you’re using Microsoft Edge as your Web browser, it turns out that there are a couple of different ways to accomplish this task, depending on whether you’d also like to add it to your Taskbar or not. If it’s just one key site I visit all the time, the Taskbar’s tiny icon that’s always visible can be a big win. If it’s a handful that I want to access whether the Web browser is running or not, however, putting their icons into the Start Menu is perfect.

Let’s start with a fun site for this demo: “Offbeat News” from Sky News:

Does that make you curious to know what’s up with Marmite? 🙂

Now one way you can remember this site is to Favorite it. That’s the empty star on the right of the address bar:

But all the real goodness is accessed from the mysterious “•••” link on the right edge. Click or tap on it and a menu appears:

Now you can take the step highlighted and “Pin this page to the taskbar” from Microsoft Edge, but a tiny bit more exploration reveals that the “More tools” submenu is even more helpful:

There ya go. So this path is “•••” > More tools > Pin this page to Start.

But let’s say you want to also have it on your Taskbar. I mean, why not? You can always remove it if it’s annoying or in the way.

So go back and choose “Pin this page to the taskbar” from the Microsoft Edge menu in your Windows system. Now a tiny icon shows up, reasonably enough, on your Taskbar:

See it? It’s the rightmost of these tiny icons. Left to right, it’s Google Chrome, Firefox, ExpressVPN, Folder view, Microsoft Store, Kindle app and, finally, Sky News Web page shortcut.

But we’re not done yet because from here you could always right click on that Taskbar shortcut, then right click on the actual shortcut shown in the resultant menu to bring up a submenu:

Notice on the first menu there’s an option “Unpin from taskbar“. Don’t like it on the Taskbar? Use that to remove it. But that second right click revealed a sub menu that offers another path to the same result: “Pin to Start“.

Either way, here’s our Sky News shortcut in the Start Menu:

That’s actually a pretty cool tile here on the Start Menu for Sky News! But one more right click, this time on the Web site tile shortcut itself, and it turns out you can make it bigger or smaller:

Some sites will support even bigger tiles, but Sky News offers small or medium. You can imagine that adding more and resizing everything to fit neatly together (think tangrams!) can result in a great way to navigate the Web, even if your browser isn’t running at the time. And that’s it. Mission accomplished.

Pro Tip: I’ve been writing about Windows 10 for quite a while. Please check out my extensive Windows 10 help pages for lots more tutorials and handy insider tips and tricks!