How to Change the Homepage in Apple Safari

Making Safari Open Exactly Where You Want

When you launch Apple’s Safari browser on a Mac, you are greeted by the standard “Start Page.” This page usually features a customisable background image, a grid of your most visited websites, a list of your Safari bookmarks, and an iCloud tabs section showing what you were recently browsing on your iPhone.

While the Start Page is highly customisable, some users simply prefer the classic browser experience of opening directly to a specific, useful website—like their email inbox, a news aggregator, or a corporate dashboard.

Fortunately, Safari gives you complete control over its startup behaviour. You can configure Safari to load a custom homepage the moment you click the compass icon in your dock, and you can even set it to open entirely different pages when you open a new tab versus a new window.

How to Set a Custom Safari Homepage

Setting a custom homepage in Safari involves two distinct steps: defining the web address, and then explicitly instructing Safari to actually use that address when launching.

1. Open the Safari browser on your Mac.
2. Look at the menu bar at the extreme top left of your screen, next to the Apple logo, and click the word Safari.
3. Select Settings from the drop-down menu (or Preferences if you are on an older version of macOS).
4. A new window will appear. Ensure you are on the General tab (the icon looks like a light switch).
5. Look down the list of options to find the Homepage text box.
6. Type or carefully paste the exact web address of your desired site (e.g., https://www.bbc.co.uk/news).
7. Press the Return key on your keyboard. Safari may ask you to confirm that you want to change your homepage; if so, click Change Homepage.

You have now defined the homepage, but you must tell Safari when to use it.

How to Make Safari Use Your New Homepage

By default, even after setting a homepage URL, Safari is programmed to continue showing the Apple Start Page. You must change the dropdown menus directly above the Homepage box to activate your choice.

1. Still in the Safari > Settings > General menu, look at the top two options.
2. Find the drop-down menu labelled New windows open with:
3. Click the menu and change it from “Start Page” to Homepage.
4. Directly below that, find the drop-down menu labelled New tabs open with:
5. Click the menu and change it from “Start Page” to Homepage.

Now, whenever you completely close and reopen Safari, or press Command+T to open a new tab, it will instantly load your chosen custom website.

How to Restore Your Previous Browsing Session

If you prefer Safari to act as an ongoing workspace, rather than starting fresh with a specific homepage every morning, you can instruct the browser to remember your exact state when you last quit the application.

1. Navigate back to Safari > Settings > General.
2. Look at the very first drop-down menu at the top of the window, labelled Safari opens with:
3. Change this setting to All windows from last session.

With this setting enabled, if you quit Safari while you have three different windows and fifteen tabs open across your screens, all of them will automatically spring back to life exactly where you left them the next time you launch the browser.

Quick Tip: Setting the Homepage to the Current Page

If you are currently browsing a website and decide you want it to be your homepage, you do not need to manually type out the URL.

1. Navigate to the page you want to use.
2. Open Safari > Settings > General.
3. Directly underneath the Homepage text box, click the button labelled Set to Current Page. Safari will instantly pull the URL from your active tab and set it as the homepage.