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

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

June 13, 2020 / Dave Taylor / Windows 10 Help / 7 Comments

I like to check in on Reuters news every morning and afternoon and am wondering if there’s a way I can just add that Web site to my Start Menu? Can you help me out?

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:

sky news- weird 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:

favorite web site page url - microsoft edge

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

microsoft edge - menu - add to start menu

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:

microsoft edge menu - more tools - add to start menu

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:

web page url shortcut - on taskbar - windows 10 win10

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:

windows 10 taskbar - right click

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:

win10 start menu - web page shortcut url sky news icon tile

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:

windows 10 start menu - right click on tile

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!

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Starbucks coffee cup I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you, Dave, for all your helpful information by buying you a cup of coffee!
add to start menu, add to taskbar, microsoft edge, start menu tile, web shortcuts, windows web shortcut

7 comments on “How Can I Add a Favorite Web Site to my Start Menu?”

  1. Sr. Maureen Maureen says:
    June 18, 2020 at 10:17 am

    Nope, I still have Pin to Start Menu missing from the options. Pin to Taskbar is the only option!

    Reply
  2. madhu singh says:
    June 18, 2020 at 4:20 am

    Thanks for this post

    Reply
  3. Jim Kloster says:
    June 17, 2020 at 11:59 am

    The “pin to start” option on all my computers has disappeared. I think it happened after an update and I’ve seen other people have this problem too. There’s a couple of convoluted workarounds out there but they don’t seem to work. “Pin to taskbar” is still there. Any ideas/solutions?

    Reply
    • Dave Taylor says:
      June 17, 2020 at 3:54 pm

      If you “pin to taskbar” can you then “pin to start” from the taskbar icon as I show?

      Reply
      • Roger Williams says:
        June 18, 2020 at 3:06 am

        I can’t find ‘pin to start’ there either

        Reply
        • Dave Taylor says:
          June 18, 2020 at 8:21 am

          Then you must have somehow locked your Start Menu or are logged in as a non-admin account? Not 100% sure what’s happening, you might need to check in with the Microsoft support team to figure things out. You can start here: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-start/cant-pin-programs-to-the-start-menu-in-windows-10/1d3a568e-cc7c-4873-b6a2-1aaf6aca3f80

          Reply
  4. Marie Ybarra says:
    June 13, 2020 at 4:28 pm

    This is great but I don’t use Edge. I use Chrome. Would like to be able to do this in chrome too.
    Thanks, Dave. You’re great.
    Marie

    Reply

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