This Chrome bookmark trick takes 5 minutes to set up but saves tons of time

The bookmark bar for Chrome is prime real estate.  Once it’s full, your bookmarks fall off the edge and disappear!  😩 But wait!  There is a simple bookmark trick that will double the number of bookmarks you can save to your bookmarks bar! 😀

The elements of a bookmark

A bookmark has three basic elements: 

• The title of the page
• The location of the bookmark
• The favicon (icon) of the website

To bookmark a website, click on the star at the end of the Omnibox (search box).  You will see a window that looks like this.

The name field is filled in with the page description created by the author, but you can change it (that’s important…we’ll come back to that later).  You can also select a folder for your bookmark. Most people want to see their bookmarks on the thin shelf under the Omnibox – the bookmarks bar.  Once you click “done” you get a bookmark that looks like this:

How to fix your bookmarks and make them smaller

Look at how much space that bookmark consumes!  It’s the same size as the 5 bookmarks to the left of it!  Follow these simple steps to shrink your bookmarks and double the number of bookmarks you can fit on the screen. 

• Right-click on an existing bookmark and select “edit”
• Delete the description for the bookmark
• Save

Your bookmark is now represented by the unique favicon for the website!  By using this bookmark trick you can fit approximately 30 bookmarks on the bookmark shelf – double (or more) the number of pages you can typically save.  The next time you add a new bookmark, make sure you delete (or shorten) the description so that it takes up as little space as possible. 

One potential problem…and a solution

There is one potential issue with my bookmark trick if you need to save multiple pages from the same website. Here’s an example: if you bookmark 5 YouTube videos, they will all use the YouTube favicon which means you can’t tell them apart.  I have a bunch of Google Sites from my school that are bookmarked for easy access.

If you need to bookmark multiple pages from your work or school website, you will probably need to place them all in a folder with a description.  To create a folder, right-click on your bookmarks bar and look for “add folder.” 

Handy pages you should bookmark (but didn’t think about it)

Now that you have all of this extra space on your bookmarks bar, why not fill it with something useful!  Here are some productivity-boosting bookmarks: 

• Chrome Utility pages: You can bookmark the setting, flag, or extension page for Google Chrome (Example – Chrome://settings)
• Creator Accounts: if you are a content creator, bookmark your YouTube creator studio or Facebook page manager, for easy, one-click access. 
• Developer Tools: I save a direct link to my Google Cloudshell instance for quick access. 
• Google Drive Files: I bookmark links to important Google Drive files for one-click access to my budget, content calendar, sales forms, etc. 

That’s it! Now go bookmark alllll those pages!

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