Show the Full Website Address in Safari

In this video, we’re going to look at how we can show the full website address in Safari on the Mac. Let’s go to my Mac.

So I’m in Safari here, and if we look at the top, you’re going to see it says www.danstutorials.com. This is what they call a top-level domain. This top-level domain will always show no matter what page I’m on in my site. So if I were to look at my Tutorials, my page on which tutorials I have, you’re going to see it still says www.danstutorials.com. It does not show me or tell me which page I’m on. It only shows me www.danstutorials.com, the top- level domain.

What I would like to do is actually see what page I’m on. In order to do this, what we need to do is show the full website address. So instead of just showing me that top- level domain, it’s going to show me the full address. In this case here, it’s showing me that I’m on the page tutorials.

Let’s take another look at this. We’re going to go to my News page. When I click on News, Safari only shows me that I’m looking at www.danstutorials.com. When I click in here, I can see that I’m looking at my news page.

I would like to have Safari not only show me this top- level domain, but I also want to see that I’m on News. How do we do that? Well we just need to go to Safari’s preferences. So we go to Safari in the menu bar, and then we go over to Preferences. Have a new window that opens up and we need to go over to the Advanced tab. Under advanced, you’re going to see an option to Show the Full Website Address.

When this is selected, anytime you go to a website, instead of showing you that top- level domain only, now Safari will show you the entire website address.

Let’s go back to my Tutorials page. You’re going to see, not only does it show me that top level domain, www.danstutorials.com, but it also shows me that I’m looking at that page Tutorials. So it’s showing me the full website address.

Now, why would you not want to have this on? Why does Apple leave this off by default? Well, a lot of web pages will have a very long URL, a very long full website address. So in most cases, you may not want to see that. All you really care about is what site you’re on. So by default, Safari will hide all of that extra information. It just tells you what website you are. But for some people they may want to see what page they’re on. This is how I have mine set, I like to see the full website address. So I make sure that I am showing the full website address when I’m in Safari. So some pages may have I have a relatively long URL, but other pages may have a short URL. In either case, I can easily see what page I’m on just by looking at that.

So that’s how you can set up Safari to show the full website address on the Mac. All you have to do is just go to Safari’s preferences, go to the Advanced tab, and then make sure that you have Show Full Website Address selected. Once you do that, any page that you visit using Safari, you’re going to not only see that top- level domain, but you’re going to see the full website address.

So that’s how you can show the full website address in Safari on the Mac.