Learn how to pin Safari tabs on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac so that you can quickly get to your favorite websites anytime.
Safari allows you to “pin” any website to keep it close at hand. I usually pin tabs with websites that I visit frequently, such as my Gmail account and social media sites. Pinned tabs are remembered across sessions, but you can unpin them at will.
How to pin a Safari tab on iPhone or iPad
Open Safari on your iPhone or iPad and hit the Tabs button in the bottom-right corner to see all your open tabs, then touch and hold a tab and choose Pin Tab.
You can also tap the Page Settings button located on the left side of the search field (the icon resembles a rectangle with two horizontal lines beneath), hit the three-dotted menu icon in the bottom-right corner and choose Pin Tab from the menu.
How to access your pinned Safari tabs
Your Safari tabs are pinned to the top of the New Tab page alongside your favorites, suggestions, etc. To view them, tap the Tabs button in the bottom-right corner.
How to unpin a Safari tab
Touch and hold any pinned tab and select Unpin Tab. Or, save yourself a step by hitting the tiny pin icon on the right side of the pinned tab and choosing the Unpin Tab command from the menu.
How to Pin a Safari tab on your Mac
You have three different ways to pin Safari tabs on your Mac, and we’re going to quickly walk you through them all.
Invoke the menu bar command
Open Safari on your Mac and visit the website you’d like to pin, then click the Window menu at the top of the screen and choose the Pin Tab command.
Right-click a tab
Open the website you’d like to pin in Safari for Mac, right-click or Control-click a pinned tab below the address bar and choose Pin Tab from the menu.
This method doesn’t work if you’ve switched to the Separate tab layout but have only one tab open. Irrespective of your preferred tab layout, you can always right-click and choose to have a tab pinned provided you have at least two tabs open.
Drag a tab all the way to the left
Click and hold a tab in Safari, drag it all the way to the left until it shrinks into a small square with only the website icon displayed. Those who prefer Safari’s Separate tab layout style will want to ensure they have at least two tabs open for this to work.
How to duplicate a pinned Safari tab
Once you’ve pinned a tab in Safari for Mac, right-click its pinned icon and select the Duplicate Tab option from the menu. Duplicating a pinned tab cab be useful for creating new instances of a particular web app, like Gmail.
How to unpin a tab in Safari for Mac
To unpin a pinned Safari tab, drag it to the right and it should unpin itself. If that doesn’t work for you, right-click the pinned tab icon and choose the Unpin Tab command from the menu to unpin your tab or Close Tab to close a pinned tab.
Opening links inside pinned tabs
Website links open either in the same tab (example) or a new tab (example), but external website links followed from a pinned tab always open in a new tab.
For instance, if you pin your favorite iDownloadBlog story in Safari and follow one of the internal links from that pinned tab, it will open in the same tab (if you don’t prefer this, you can configure Safari to always open all links in new tabs).
But if you follow an external link instead, Safari will always open it in a new tab—even if the website creator has specifically forced a link to open in the current tab.
Summing up, websites you’ve pinned in Safari remain pinned until unpinned manually, while external links from pinned tabs always open in a new tab.
To check:
- Visit this Apple.com link, and it will open in the current tab.
- Next, use the back button to come back here and pin this iDB post in Safari.
- Now, click the same Apple.com link above, and it will automatically open in a new tab. This way, iDB always stays pinned even when you visit another website via it.
Pinned tabs survive Safari relaunches
Once you’ve pinned a site, it will remain pinned even if you close Safari and reopen it later or restart your device.
Pinned tabs stay across Safari window
For convenience, pinned tabs appear in all Safari windows. However, tabs pinned in a standard window won’t appear in a newly-created private window.
Pining tabs in a private Safari window
You can pin tabs while browsing the web privately in a private Safari window, but there are two noteworthy things worth pointing out. Firstly, while pinning a site in a private window makes it appear across all private windows, your private pinned tabs are gone forever if you close all private windows or quit and reopen Safari.
The same is not true in iOS and iPadOS editions of Safari; There, any websites pinned in a private-browsing session in Safari on iPhone remain pinned even after closing the private-browsing window or quitting and relaunching Safari.
Pinned tabs don’t sync over iCloud
Unlike your bookmarks, favorites, and other settings, your ;pinned Safari tabs don’t sync across your Apple devices. This means that any websites you’ve pinned in, say, Safari for Mac won’t be accessible on your iPhone, iPad, or another Mac.
Pinned tabs in tab groups
You can even pin tabs inside tab groups. Just create a new tab group, and start pinning sites there using the instructions in this tutorial. Anytime you return to this particular group of tabs, your pinned websites will be there for you.
In addition to pinning, you can also bookmark important websites to save them for later. For even quicker access, consider marking Safari websites as favorites!
Other Safari tips: