How to Add a Shortcut to the Home Screen on iPhone

Two completely different things get called “adding a shortcut to the home screen” on iPhone, and searching for the phrase mixes them together. One is putting a website on your home screen so it opens like an app.

The other is putting a shortcut you built in the Shortcuts app there so it runs with one tap. This post covers both, plus the custom icon trick that people use to redesign their entire home screen, and the one iOS behaviour that annoys everybody.

Case one: a website you want to open like an app

This is the older, simpler one and it uses Safari.

1. Open Safari and go to the page you want. Safari only. Chrome on iPhone cannot do this, which catches a lot of people out.
2. Tap the share button, the square with the arrow coming out of it, at the bottom of the screen.
3. Scroll the list down and tap Add to Home Screen.
4. Edit the name if you want. Keep it short, since anything past about twelve characters gets truncated under the icon.
5. Tap Add at the top right.

The icon lands on your last home screen page. If the site publishes a proper touch icon you get that image. Otherwise iOS grabs a screenshot of the page and uses it, which usually looks poor. Tapping it opens the site in a standalone window with no Safari address bar, which is why a well built site feels close to an app this way.

Case two: a shortcut from the Shortcuts app

This is the one most people mean when the phrase includes the word shortcut.

1. Open the Shortcuts app and find the shortcut in My Shortcuts.
2. Press and hold its tile, then tap Details. On some iOS versions you tap the three dots on the tile and then the settings icon.
3. Tap Add to Home Screen.
4. You now get a preview with an editable name and an icon. Tap the icon image to change it.
5. Tap Add.

Now the annoying part, said plainly because you will notice it in about four seconds. Tapping that icon opens the Shortcuts app for a moment before your shortcut runs. There is a brief flash of the Shortcuts interface.

This is how iOS handles it and there is no setting that removes it. It is a fraction of a second on a recent iPhone and slightly longer on an older one. Anyone claiming a method that removes the flash entirely is describing an old iOS version or an unreliable workaround.

Giving it an icon that does not look terrible

The icon picker inside Shortcuts offers a colour and a glyph, which is fine and instantly recognisable as a shortcut. If you want a specific image instead, at the Add to Home Screen preview tap the icon and choose Choose Photo or Choose File, then pick an image from your library.

A few practical notes from doing this a lot:

• Use a square image. iOS crops to a square and rounds the corners itself, so anything else gets trimmed unpredictably.
• Around 512 by 512 pixels is plenty. Larger just wastes space.
• Leave breathing room around the edges of the artwork, since the rounded corner mask eats the corners.
• A transparent PNG gets a solid background behind it, so decide the background colour yourself rather than letting iOS choose.

Preparing the image is where Grabio saves you a step. It is a free Apple Shortcut with on-device tools for cropping an image square, resizing it to exact pixel dimensions, and converting between PNG and JPG, all of which run on your phone with nothing uploaded.

The square crop walkthrough is in cropping a photo to a square, and resizing to exact dimensions covers getting it to 512 by 512 precisely.

Case three: launching a specific screen inside an app

Less known and genuinely useful. Many apps register URL schemes, which means a shortcut containing a single Open URL action can jump straight to a specific screen. Wrap that in a shortcut, add it to the home screen with a custom icon, and you have a one tap launcher for something buried three menus deep.

Building that shortcut takes two actions and a minute, and the general method for putting a shortcut together is worth knowing on its own.

Widgets are often the better answer

Before you fill a page with home screen icons, consider the Shortcuts widget. Long press an empty area of the home screen, tap the plus, search for Shortcuts, and add the medium or large widget. It shows four or eight shortcuts in one tile and they run without the app flash you get from an icon.

I keep my most used shortcuts in a widget and reserve home screen icons for the two or three I want visually distinct. It is the arrangement that has survived longest for me.

What I put on mine

My own home screen has Grabio on it, since it is what I reach for whenever a file needs converting, compressing or saving.

Grabio covers HEIC to JPG, photo compression, resizing, square cropping, background removal, location stripping, photo to PDF, live photo to GIF, video compression, audio extraction and QR code generation, with everything running on the phone through Apple’s own actions. Social video links get handed off to a downloader I have tested, which is described in full in how Grabio works.

Two other one tap items earn their place for me. A QR generator for sharing a wifi password or a link across a table, covered in generating a QR code on iPhone, and a QR reader for codes that arrive as an image rather than on a poster, which is scanning a QR code image without an app.

Removing one later

Press and hold the icon and choose Remove Bookmark for a website, or Delete Bookmark on some iOS versions. For a shortcut icon, removing it from the home screen leaves the shortcut itself intact inside the Shortcuts app, which is what you want most of the time. Deleting the shortcut from the app removes it everywhere.

Try it with one you will actually use

Get the Shortcut, add it to your home screen with a square icon you made yourself, and you have a working example of every technique in this post sitting on your phone. It costs nothing and there is no account to create.

FAQ

Why does the Shortcuts app open before my shortcut runs?

Because a home screen shortcut icon is a bookmark that hands off to the Shortcuts app, which then executes the actions. iOS has no way to run a shortcut without briefly loading its host app. The flash is unavoidable and lasts a fraction of a second.

Can I add a website to my home screen from Chrome on iPhone?

No. Add to Home Screen is a Safari feature on iOS. Open the page in Safari, use the share button there, and the icon it creates works exactly the same afterwards regardless of which browser you normally use.

How do I change the icon of a shortcut on my home screen?

You cannot edit it in place. Remove the existing icon, then add the shortcut to the home screen again and tap the icon image in the preview to choose a photo or file. A square image around 512 pixels works best.

Does deleting the home screen icon delete the shortcut?

No. Removing the icon deletes only the bookmark. The shortcut stays in the Shortcuts app and continues to work from the share sheet, from Siri, and from any widget it appears in.

Can I put a shortcut in the dock at the bottom?

Yes. Once the icon is on a home screen page, drag it into the dock the way you would any app icon. You will need to move an existing dock item out first, since the dock holds four.

Why does my website icon look like a screenshot of the page?

Because that site does not publish an apple-touch-icon image, so iOS falls back to a thumbnail of the page. There is no way to override it from your side. Making a shortcut with an Open URL action and a custom icon is the workaround.