General
Join or sign in
Sign in to save your progress
Welcome to the 'Closing unused websites on an iPhone' video course. In this video, you'll learn how to see which websites are open in the browser on your iPhone and close the ones you no longer need. The steps will be similar on an iPad.
Closing websites you're not using can help your browser run smoothly and your phone perform at its best. For this demonstration, we'll use the Safari browser, which is installed on all iPhones. From the Home screen, look for the Safari app icon. It looks like a blue compass. Tap the Safari icon to open it.
When you have more than one website open, Safari keeps each site in its own tab, like pages in a book. The Tabs icon looks like two overlapping squares, and depending on your iPhone model, appears at bottom right of Safari, or in the More menu. For this demonstration, we'll tap on the More icon, which looks like three vertical dots. In the popup that appears, tap the All Tabs icon once.
You'll see a grid of thumbnails, or small images, each showing a preview of one open website. At the bottom right is a blue tick, the word Tabs and a number. This is how many tabs you currently have open. To close a single website, tap the cross in the top right corner of its thumbnail. You could also tap the thumbnail to open the web page. If you accidentally close a page, press and hold the plus button on the bottom left of the screen.
A list of Recently Closed Tabs will appear and you can tap any site on the list to reopen it. To close all tabs at once, tap the More icon in the bottom right to open the menu. Then tap All Tabs again. Touch and hold the blue tick until a popup appears. Tap Close All Tabs. Then tap Close All Tabs again to confirm.