When you start typing a website address or search query into the Safari Smart Search field on macOS, the browser attempts to anticipate what you want to visit. To make page transitions feel instantaneous, Safari quietly downloads the entire webpage of the predicted top search result in the background before you even press the Return key or click a link. While this feature—known as Preload Top Hit—can shave a fraction of a second off page load times, it comes with hidden costs.
Background preloading consumes significant cellular data when tethering from your iPhone, strains metered broadband connections, and uses unnecessary system memory. Furthermore, it silently sends HTTP requests to websites you never actually intended to visit, triggering analytical tracking scripts. In this guide, you will learn how to disable top hit preloading in Safari on macOS.
Why Disable Preload Top Hit in Safari?
Turning off automated background preloading provides several distinct advantages:
- Saves internet data: Prevents Safari from downloading multi-megabyte media assets, high-resolution hero images, and embedded video clips for search results you bypass.
- Protects browsing privacy: Eliminates unwanted background web requests, ensuring third-party servers and advertising trackers are only pinged when you explicitly choose to visit a website.
- Improves low-bandwidth stability: On weak hotel Wi-Fi, train connections, or mobile hotspots, background preloading competes with your active downloads and video streams.
How to Turn Off Preload Top Hit in Safari on Mac
Disabling top hit preloading requires adjusting a single setting inside Safari’s search preferences:
- Launch Safari on your Mac.
- Click on Safari in the top menu bar (next to the Apple logo).
- Select Settings… (or Preferences… on older macOS versions), or press the shortcut Cmd + ,.
- In the preferences window, click on the Search tab represented by a magnifying glass icon.
- Locate the checkbox labelled Preload Top Hit in the background.
- Click the checkbox to untick it.
Close the Settings window. Safari will instantly cease preloading web content in the background. The Smart Search field will continue providing smart URL suggestions, but will only fetch data when you actively press Return.
Additional Data-Saving Settings in Safari Search
While inside Safari’s Search tab, consider customising other automated query features to streamline your browsing:
- Include search engine suggestions: Untick this box if you prefer your search engine not to log every character you type into the address bar.
- Include Safari Suggestions: Untick this option to prevent Apple servers from serving news, Wikipedia snippets, and App Store recommendations in search drop-down menus.
- Quick Website Search: This feature indexes internal site searches (such as typing “wiki” followed by a query) without downloading full landing pages.