2 Quick Ways To Easily Get Rid Of Frequently Visited Sites On Safari

Frequently Visited Sites On Safari

Safari (Web Browser) is one of the world’s fastest working browsers, developed to run only on iOS devices, including iPhone,iPad, & Mac. With a rapid fast JavaScript engine, Safari is also one of the safest and most secure browsers with varied beneficial features. No matter how vast our internet surfing routine can be, there are still websites and web addresses that we visit more frequently than the rest. To make it easier for us to access those websites and save time typing out the web addresses every time, Safari came up with the feature of automatically showing the tabs of frequently visited sites on the start page.Even though it’s helpful and time-saving during personal use, at the same time when we are sharing the device with others we may not want them to know about our web routines. In that case, we should always know about how to get rid of frequently visited sites on safari so that we can eliminate them anytime.

2 Quick Ways To Easily Get Rid Of Frequently Visited Sites On Safari

What Is Frequently Visited Feature In Safari?

On the Safari browser home page, there is this “Frequently Visited” feature, which displays the habitually visited websites. They may also duplicate the ones already added to the favorites. Sometimes there are pinned websites that are routinely visited on the home page. The sites displayed under Frequently Visited can vary according to the search patterns and may change with time. For privacy concerns, we may not want others to see the sites we have frequently visited or maybe we do not want to visit those sites anymore. In both these cases, we might want to hide or delete ‘Frequently Visited’ from Safari’s start page.

How Can You Get Rid Of Frequently Visited Sites On Safari?

If you have decided that the displayed sites on the Safari Homepage in the form of thumbnails or icons should be removed, then here’s the process description which is pretty simple. It can be applied across all iCloud-Connected devices. We can hide the list of sites from the homepage or delete the data from the system. Again we can manually select and hide a specific site and again can get it back or permanently delete it from the search history with or without the website data and the cookies.

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Method 1: Hide ‘Frequently Visited’ From Home Page

One of the two ways is to hide the sites shown on the home page by disabling the toggle switch. Or manually select a particular website and hide it from the displayed list.

Steps To Hide “Frequently Visited” From macOS

If it’s a matter of hiding the sites from the start page, then we can customize the Homepage not to display those sites.

  • Step 1: Open the Safari Home page.
  • Step 2: Go to the options button at the down-right corner of the home page.
  • Step 3: Click the preferences icon
  • Step 4: Deselect the box displayed adjacent to the Frequently Visited option.
  • Step 5: Right-Click anywhere on the screen to update the preference, and then the tab list will disappear from the home screen.

You also synchronize their Start page with all the other iCloud-connected devices by turning on the “Use Start Page On All devices” toggle switch on the customization option. But the devices should be running on the same Apple Id and have the updated version of Safari and the 2FA enabled. Also, when ‘Frequently Visited’ is hidden, we might face problems accessing our recent tabs quickly. To resolve this, we can use different help tools to organize our opened tabs in a few clicks which will work seamlessly according to our preference, like Tab Finder.

Quick Tip: Tab Finder assembles your open tabs from all open browsers at one place. This saves your time and you need not to go through each of them individually. It is hassle-free, efficient and smart, and can easily be installed from Dock.

Steps To Hide “Frequently Visited” From iPhone

  • Step 1: Open the Safari App, a new start page comes up only if a tab is not opened previously.
  • Step 2: If a tab is previously opened, press the Tabs button and click the ‘+’ sign to open a new tab.
  • Step 3: Scroll down the Home page to get to the Edit button at the down and click on it to open the preferences toggles.
  • Step 4: Toggle off the “ Frequently Visited” switch and close the customization page to see the Frequently Visited section gone from the home page.
Did You Know: One can easily get back the web pages list on the Start page again by just switching on the “Frequently Visited” toggle in the editor section.

Method 2: Delete “Frequently Visited” Sites

The con of the previous method is that it will only hide the sites, but if one wants to permanently get rid of them, deleting the sites from the browsing history itself is the better idea.

Steps To Delete “Frequently Visited” From iPhone

  • Step 1: Open the Safari app on your phone and the Home page appears.
  • Step 2: Click the Book icon at the bottom, click the Clock icon, and then hit the “Clear” button.

Note: An actions menu box will pop up with a warning message on the screen. It will state that deleting your Safari history will also delete the entire search history details, cookies & additional browsing data stored across all of your iCloud-connected devices

  • Step 3: Click on ‘All time’ option for clearing out the entire browsing data. Doing so will also remove the ‘Frequently Visited’ part from Safari homepage.

Steps To Delete “Frequently Visited” From macOS

  • Step 1: Open the Safari Home page.
  • Step 2: Click on the Safari Button and then hit the ‘Clear History’ option.
  • Step 3: A small menu box will appear, click on ‘All History’ from the drop-down menu to have a clean browsing history, and finally click on ‘Clear History’ to remove the displayed list of sites on the home page.

Using Third-Party Software To Remove Frequently Visited Safari Sites

Different third-party applications like CleanMyMac X can be used to get rid of frequently visited sites from the Safari Home page in order to clear caches, and cookies and altogether clean the system to keep it updated and optimize Mac’s performance, all of these happen in just a few clicks. It’s a complete all-rounder application and delivers multiple features to the users. Have a look at some of it’s highlighting features below:

  • It deletes browsing history along with unused apps without leaving behind their files and folders.
  • CleanMyMac X also clears out caches and sorts through old unused files and takes care of the disc space.
  • It continuously keeps scanning for malware and viruses and neutralizes them.

What Are Disadvantages Of Deleting Frequently Visited Sites On Safari?

Permanently deleting browsing history which results in removing the Frequently Visited sites from the homepage, can be helpful for privacy reasons. However, sometimes it may cause minor problems, like when permanent browsing history is deleted, we would no longer have access to the previously searched information and also in some websites our login status changes and we have to visit those sites and sign back.

Also Read: Immediate Steps To Repair Water Damaged MacBook

Conclusion

The Frequently Visited sites on the homepage of Safari just give access to the most often visited sites easily in one click. But due to privacy reasons, it’s effortless to get rid of the frequently visited sites on Safari, while keeping our preferred sites in the favorites section. While we may not want others to know about our web routines in detail while sharing the devices, the best way is to use both methods. Hide the Frequently visited sites by switching off the toggle in the settings and then also delete the browsing history to keep it clean. Trying out different applications like CleanMyMac X and Tab Finders can also ease up the process and make it hassle-free.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Q) How can I remove a particular site from Frequently Visited?

Ans: Manually a particular site can be removed, simply tap and hold the shortcut of the site and then click Delete to remove it from the Frequently Visited.

Q) How to stop a once-visited site from appearing as a suggestion in the search bar of Safari?

Ans: Clearing History will keep them from coming up in suggestions and also they can be turned off in the Safari→Settings→ Siri Suggestions (switch off the toggle).

About Namrata

Namrata is an aspiring author, currently writing for Selectyourdeals. She has been writing for different anthologies for quite some time. Apart from writing, Namrata has a keen interest in technology and robotics, and is pursuing Btech in Computer Science from KIIT.

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