How to Set Your Homepage in Chrome

Chrome has two settings that people mix up constantly: the homepage (what opens when you click the Home button) and startup tabs (what opens when Chrome launches). They live on different settings pages, do different things, and changing one doesn't touch the other. Here's how to set the one you actually mean.

Turn on the Home button

By default, most Chrome installs don't even show the Home button. Go to chrome://settings/appearance, or navigate there manually: Settings → Appearance in the left sidebar. Flip "Show Home button" on. A small house icon appears to the left of the address bar.

Set your homepage to a specific page

With the Home button on, two sub-options appear underneath it:

• "New Tab page" — clicking Home opens a fresh New Tab page, same as opening a new tab.
• "Enter custom web address" — type the URL you want (your company intranet, a dashboard, a search engine, anything). Click the checkmark to save.

From then on, clicking the house icon — or the keyboard shortcut Alt+Home (Windows/Linux) or Cmd+Shift+H (Mac) — loads that page in your current tab, replacing whatever was there.

Homepage vs. startup tabs — they're not the same setting

This is the part that trips people up: setting a homepage does not change what Chrome opens when it launches. Those are two separate settings pages:

Setting	Where	What it controls
Homepage	chrome://settings/appearance	What opens when you click the Home button or use its shortcut
Startup tabs	chrome://settings/onStartup	What opens automatically every time Chrome launches

You can have a homepage with no startup pages configured (Chrome just restores your last session or opens a blank tab at launch, and the Home button is a manual shortcut back to one page). Or you can have startup pages with no homepage set (the Home button stays hidden, but Chrome always opens a fixed set of tabs on launch). They don't inherit from each other — set them separately if you want both. See How to Set Chrome to Open Specific Tabs on Startup if launch-time behavior is what you're actually after.

Where a single homepage runs out

A homepage is one button pointing at one URL — useful, but it doesn't scale past that:

• Only one destination. If your "home base" is actually three or four pages (email, a dashboard, a docs site), the Home button can only hold one of them.
• No history of what you meant to check. It's a fixed bookmark, not a place to collect pages you're partway through or planning to revisit.
• Doesn't help with the tabs already open. A homepage gets you back to a starting point — it does nothing for the twenty tabs that accumulated since you last used it.

If your actual problem is "I want a home base with more than one page in it," Amazing Tabs covers what the Home button can't:

• Save a whole set of tabs as a named space — "Morning routine," "Client X," whatever groups make sense — and reopen the entire set with one click instead of one URL.
• Press ⌘K (or Ctrl+K) to jump straight to any saved page by title or content, no toolbar button required.
• Free for up to 100 saved links, with sync across devices on paid plans.

One button, one URL — Amazing Tabs handles the rest. Add Amazing Tabs to Chrome — free, no signup required.

Quick recap

• chrome://settings/appearance → toggle "Show Home button" on, then choose a custom URL or the New Tab page.
• The Home button is manual — it only fires when you click it or press Alt+Home / Cmd+Shift+H.
• Startup tabs are a separate setting (chrome://settings/onStartup) that opens pages automatically at launch — setting one doesn't change the other.
• A homepage syncs across signed-in devices, but it's still a single URL, not a routine.
• For what opens automatically at launch, see How to Set Chrome to Open Specific Tabs on Startup; for keeping a few pages always in reach once Chrome is already open, see How to Pin Tabs in Chrome.