Changing Your Microsoft Edge Start Page

Don’t like your Microsoft Edge start page? No worries. You can easily change it to whatever you like and you can even set multiple start pages if you want. I’ll show you exactly how you can do that (and more) in this article.

In a previous article I’ve already talked about searching on the internet with Google rather than Bing in Microsoft Edge. And I’ve also talked a bit about several icons to start Microsoft Edge. Here, I want to focus on what you will see when you start Microsoft Edge.

The information you see on your screen when you start Microsoft Edge is the default Microsoft Edge start page, in other words, what Microsoft has designed it to be. Now, you may be absolutely ok with that, but I have noticed that, more often than not, people prefer to have another Microsoft Edge start page.

Changing Your Microsoft Edge Start Page

So, if you’re not happy with your Microsoft start page when you start Edge, check out how easy it is to change in what follows below.

Basically the instructions to change your Microsoft Edge start page can be condensed in one paragraph.

How to change your Microsoft Edge start page (more tips further on):

Click the three dots in the top right corner of your Edge screen and select settings. Then click the “On startup” setting and click “Open a specific page or pages”. Now click on “Add a new page” and enter the url of the page you want to use as Microsoft Edge start page.

That's basically it.

Prefer to have the more detailed explanation with screenshots and all? Sure! Let’s take a look.

To begin, click the three dots near the top right corner of your Edge window and select settings.

Then, in your Microsoft Edge settings screen, click the “On startup” setting.

Now click “Open a specific page or pages” and click the “Add a new page” button.

A small window will pop up with the title “Add a new page”. Where it says “Enter a URL”, type the url of the page you want to set as your Microsoft Edge start page. In the example below I’ve typed www.google.com because many people find it convenient to be able to search Google directly from their Microsoft Edge start page.

Now click the “Add button” to continue.

Your new start page will now be displayed under the “Open a specific page or pages” section in your Edge “On startup” settings.

You can repeat these steps if you want, if you want to set multiple Microsoft Edge start pages. All the pages you add as start pages will appear in separate browsing tabs each time you start Microsoft Edge on your computer.

When you are ready setting your Microsoft Edge start page(s), you can simply close the settings tab.

Setting Long And Complex Web Addresses As Start Page

What to do if you’re surfing the web and you land on a page that you want to set as your start page, but the web address of that page is really long and difficult to remember? It’s inconvenient to enter long and complex web addresses in the “custom” field of your Microsoft start page settings.

Let’s take for example the CNN money page where you can follow CNN’s stock price forecast for Apple shares. In the image below you can see that the url for this page is somewhat longer. Rest assured that some web addresses are much longer and much more complex, but let’s just use this as an example.

If you would like to change Microsoft Edge start page settings to this web page, it’s easier to use a copy command. To do so, use your left mouse button and click anywhere on the web address in your Edge address bar.

This will mark and select the web address in blue.

Click anywhere in the address bar to mark and select the address

Now you can use your right mouse button and right-click anywhere on the blue selected web address and select “Copy”.

Then you can use the same steps as explained above to go and change Microsoft Edge start page settings, except for the step where you enter the web address.

Rather than typing the web address you can now right-click the “Enter a URL” field and select “Paste” to enter the long web address.

This will set your Microsoft Edge homepage to the starting page of your choice.

Pinning Specific Webpages To Your Start Menu

An alternative to setting a specific web page as your start page is creating a start menu shortcut for them if you want to be able to open this pages with a single click.

Let’s take again the example of the CNN stock forecast page from above. If you are currently viewing that specific page and you would like to create a shortcut in your start menu, click on the three dots menu in the top-right corner of Microsoft Edge, select "More tools" and then select “Pin to start”.

From then on, a shortcut to that specific page will appear in your Windows 10 start menu.

It will probably appear at the bottom of your start menu, which means you might have to scroll down a little bit in order to reach it. Please refer to my article about organizing your Windows 10 start menu if you want to learn more about customizing the Windows 10 start menu.

Also, if you’re interested in creating a desktop shortcut to a specific web page rather than a shortcut in your start menu, you might want to check out my article on Microsoft Edge desktop shortcuts.

There's also my other article about setting the Microsoft Edge home page which contains a few more tips beyond setting the home page. Feel free to follow the link above to read the article; it contains a link back so you can come back here.

Oh, and don't forget to check out my page on vertical tabs in Microsoft Edge. Vertical tabs may be of no interest to some, but for others they're a real game-changer!

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