Customize Safari’s Start Page

In this video, I’m going to show you how you can modify or change the settings for your Start page in Safari. Let’s go to my Mac.

Let’s first go and open up Safari here. Now, if you’re not familiar with the Start page, when you first open up Safari, the window that Safari brings up as your Start page. We have our favorites here. I can also see my most frequently visited websites. I have my privacy report. And then, when I add something to my reading list, I can see what I’ve recently added to my reading list. So this is the Start page. Again, when you first open up a web browser, this is the page that Safari brings up by default. If I close this, I’m going to click on the red dot, and now I go back under file here, and I go to new window. It’s going to bring me to my Start page.

Now, if your browser does not open up to the Start page, what you’ll need to do is go into your Safari preferences to do that. You go up to Safari in the menu bar, and then you go over to Preferences, and then you make sure that you are looking at General.

Under general, you’re going to see a couple of options here. New windows open with and new tabs open width. You can see that both of mine are set to my Start page. If you want to use a Start page, make sure that this dropdown is set to your Start page.

Now, let’s look at how we can modify this when looking at our Start page. When you go down to the bottom right corner, you’re going to see these three horizontal lines. What this allows us to do when it’s clicked on is change our Start page. If I no longer want to see my favorites, I uncheck favorites. Maybe I do not want to see Siri suggestions. I can uncheck that. So we can show and hide different sections. This includes favorites frequently visited websites: privacy report, series suggestions, reading lists, and the background image. So if you’ve never used reading lists and don’t use it, you can select this to turn it off. And it’s not going to show up on your start page.

Well, what about this background image? What we can do is we can change the background image here. So if I want this image here to be my background for the Start page, I click on it, and now we can see when we’re looking at our browser. I have a new background for my Start page. I can go over to the right here or swipe over to the left, and I have more backgrounds. You can also add your background. If we go back to the beginning here, you’re going to see a plus. And from there, I’m able to select my image. How do we remove a background? Once we set it, we can see that I’ve set a background here. I no longer want this background. I want to have a nice clean background. Well, all you have to do is just de-select it here, and it no longer shows the background.

So that’s how we edit our Start page in Safari on the Mac. We first have to go to our Start page. If your browser isn’t set up, if Safari is not set up to use the Start page, you go to Safari Preferences, and under General, you can set it to use a Start page when you open up a new window and a new tab. Once you’re on your Start page, you go down to the lower right-hand corner. You’re going to see three lines; click on that. And from there, you can turn on and off different sections, including favorites, your reading list, your privacy report, and even the background.

So that’s how we customize or change our Start-up page in Safari on the Mac.