Why You Should Add Sites to Home Screen Using Safari on iPhone

Safari comes with useful features on iPhone and iPad. Some of them include a still active desktop mode, configurable site settings, and support for content blockers. However, I think people often forget about Safari’s ability to add sites directly to the home screen, especially on the iPhone or iPad.

If you’ve just dismissed the Add to Home screen option as another sophisticated way to bookmark sites, then you’re surprised. Home screen shortcuts offer several advantages.

Why Create Home Screen Shortcuts

Safari’s ability to add sites to the home screen has been around for years on iPhone and iPad. But it’s the eventual support for progressive web apps with iOS 11.3 that started to make more sense.

Progressive web apps are websites designed to function as real “ apps ” – though with limitations such as lack of support for notifications – once you’ve added them to the screen. Home. Not all websites are PWAs, but that shouldn’t stop you from reaping at least some of the benefits listed below.

Access sites faster

Safari website shortcuts appear as clean-cut icons shaped after the site’s logos and favicons, making them easily accessible and fairly difficult to miss. Beats of having to browse favorites or bookmarks in Safari when you can load them with one click directly from the home screen.

But what’s even more useful is that they also appear as “applications” in the search (Spotlight), which helps you easily reduce clutter if you have installed many applications.

Stay focused

Do you hate being distracted by bookmarks and autofill suggestions in Safari? Home screen shortcuts should help you. You can easily visit sites with one click without looking at a Safari tab.

Best of all, these shortcuts also launch certain sites into a dedicated instance of Safari. This means that you can completely give up on distracting browser features. Most notable is the lack of tabs, the address bar, navigation controls, etc. Don’t worry, you can still navigate using effortless gestures.

If you tend to procrastinate, especially when you want to do work on the iPhone or iPad, this “limitation” should probably work wonders. However, there is no way to know if a site will launch in a dedicated Safari instance until you add it to the home screen.

App-like experience

If your favorite websites don’t have related apps on the App Store, then adding them to the home screen should serve as decent alternatives.

For starters, you get appropriate icons that don’t differ from those of dedicated apps. And as mentioned earlier, some of the sites you launch using shortcuts appear without standard browser elements (tabs, address bar, etc.), allowing for an experience very similar to an application.

In addition, sites that actually offer PWA functionality – not much, unfortunately – still work better for emulating real applications. Twitter is a great example. Compare the actual app and PWA side by side, and you’ll only notice a few subtle differences.

For a list of PWA sites, see Appscope.

Offline functionality

The ability to operate offline is a key benefit associated with sites that have PWA functionality. They cache a limited amount of web content locally, so you can easily browse a site even if you lose internet connectivity.

It will not matter if the PWA is very online oriented. In the case of Twitter PWA, you can visit the old feeds or pages you’ve visited before, but that’s about it.

Free storage

Home screen shortcuts are also the best way to replace apps from the App Store and reduce storage space. For example, installing a PWA like Twitter reduces a significant amount of storage otherwise used by the application itself – around 100 to 150 MB. Very handy if you carry an iPhone or iPad with less storage.

PWA caches also have an upper limit of 50MB imposed, so you shouldn’t have to deal with temporary file accumulations and related issues.

However, you may not want to replace the dedicated apps that are essential yet. Although PWAs work well, for the most part, they do not support essential features, such as system notifications, background refresh, etc.

How to Add Sites to the Home Screen

Have you decided to add a few sites to the home screen of your iPhone or iPad? So here’s how to do it. The steps below are geared towards iOS 13 and iPadOS, but they also work the same way – except for visual changes to the share sheet – in iOS 12 and iOS 11.

Step 1: Visit the site you want to add to the Home screen, then tap the Share Sheet icon. Next, scroll down the share sheet and tap the option labeled Add to Home screen.

Unless you want to create a shortcut to a specific page, stay on the home page of the site while displaying the sharing sheet, especially if you want to emulate the site as an application.

2nd step: Enter a name for the shortcut, then press Add. If you want to rely on search (Spotlight) to access your shortcuts faster, keep in mind the name you give it.

Note: If the site does not provide an appropriate home screen icon, Safari will use a web page snapshot instead.

That’s it. The home screen shortcut is now added. You can start using it immediately. There is no guarantee if a site would actually open in a dedicated Safari window, or if it would even include PWA functionality until you start using it.

Store

Adding sites to the Home screen not only allows you to access your favorite sites faster, but they also provide a more targeted experience. And if a site offers real PWA support, then you are in for a real treat. Don’t expect the same level of functionality you would normally get from a dedicated App Store app – at least not yet – and you should be good.