How to Block the YouTube Homepage and Land on Subscriptions

Last updated September 2026.

The YouTube home page is a wall of thumbnails picked for one reason: to get you to click. You open youtube.com to find one tutorial, and the home feed offers you twenty other things first. For a lot of people, that page is where the lost hour begins.

You do not need to quit YouTube to fix this. You only need to stop landing on that page. This guide shows three ways to do it, from a free YouTube setting to a Chrome extension, and explains when hiding recommendations is better than redirecting.

Why the YouTube homepage is the problem#

Most of what people watch on YouTube is picked by YouTube. At CES in 2018, YouTube's chief product officer said that more than 70% of watch time comes from the platform's recommendations (CBS News / CNET). The home feed is the first and biggest place those recommendations show up.

The fix is simple in principle: when you type youtube.com, land somewhere that does not have a recommendation feed. Your Subscriptions page is a good choice. It shows only channels you chose to follow, in date order, and it ends. Search still works from the top bar, and every video link still opens normally.

Three ways to get rid of the YouTube home feed#

None of these is wrong. They solve slightly different problems, which the sections below cover.

How to redirect the YouTube homepage to Subscriptions#

This setup uses a homepage-only rule in Redirect. A Pattern rule whose path is exactly / matches only the home page. It does not match /watch, /feed/subscriptions, /results or channel pages like /@channel, so everything except the home feed keeps working.

1. Install Redirect

Add Redirect to Chrome (or another Chromium browser such as Arc, Brave, Edge, Opera or Vivaldi). It does not run in Firefox or Safari.

2. Add a new rule and choose Pattern

Open the Redirect dashboard (Alt+Shift+F opens it from any tab), add a rule, and pick the Pattern rule type instead of whole site.

3. Enter the homepage pattern

Type exactly *://*.youtube.com/ as the pattern. The *:// part covers http and https, *.youtube.com covers www and m subdomains, and the single / at the end is what limits it to the home page.

4. Set a Custom URL destination

By default, a blocked site sends you to your Focus dashboard with your goals. For this rule, choose Custom URL and enter https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions. Now typing youtube.com, clicking a bookmark to it, or clicking the YouTube logo inside the site all land you on Subscriptions. Redirect catches in-app navigation, so going back to the home page from inside YouTube is caught too, even without a page reload.

5. Pick what a pause costs

Sometimes you will want the real home feed, maybe to find something you half remember. Each rule has a pause: choose a length (1 to 60 minutes) and a task you must complete first. For a homepage rule, a 60 second wait or a reason prompt works well. It is enough friction to stop the reflex without making the home page impossible to reach.

6. Optional: send Shorts to your Focus dashboard

Shorts is the other big feed. Add a second rule with the path youtube.com/shorts and leave the destination as your Focus dashboard. Regular videos keep working; only Shorts is redirected. The block YouTube Shorts page has more detail, and how to stop watching YouTube Shorts covers the habit side.

Hiding vs redirecting: which is better?#

Hiding extensions change what YouTube looks like. Redirecting changes where you land. Both are honest ways to deal with the home feed.

Unhook is the best known hiding extension. Its Chrome Web Store listing (over 1,000,000 users, 4.9 stars at the time of writing) lists options to hide the homepage feed, the video sidebar, related videos, Shorts, end screen suggestions, comments, and the trending tab, plus turning off autoplay. You toggle each one in the popup, and it is also available for Firefox and Edge (Chrome Web Store).

RYS (Remove YouTube Suggestions) is similar and open source. Its free features include hiding homepage suggestions, Shorts, sidebar recommendations and end of video suggestions. Its premium features include homepage redirects to Subscriptions, Watch Later or Library, a settings lock, and scheduling (Chrome Web Store).

Hiding is better when:

• The sidebar and end screen pull you in more than the home page does. Redirect does not remove panels inside the watch page; Unhook and RYS do.
• You want to clean up YouTube without any friction at all.
• You use Firefox, where Redirect does not run.

Redirecting is better when:

• You tend to switch the hiding off "just for a minute" and forget to turn it back on. In Redirect, pausing or loosening a rule costs its task, and a pause ends on its own.
• You want the same tool to handle other sites too, like Reddit or Instagram, with schedules and a daily pause limit.
• You want to see your own pattern: the Focus dashboard shows redirects per day and the reasons you gave for each pause.

Many people use both: a hiding extension for the watch page, and a redirect for the home page and Shorts.

The free option: turn off YouTube watch history#

YouTube has a built-in way to empty the home feed. If you turn off watch history and do not have significant prior history, YouTube shows only the search bar and the left menu on the home page, with no recommended videos (TechCrunch).

1. Open your YouTube history controls

Go to YouTube History in Google's My Activity page and open Controls (YouTube Help).

2. Turn off watch history

Choose Turn off. You can also delete past history on the same page.

3. Check the home page

Reload youtube.com. The empty home page applies when you do not have significant prior history, so if you still see recommendations, deleting your old history helps.

The tradeoff is that you lose your history list, and YouTube can simply show recommendations again if you turn history back on. It is also one setting away from being undone, which is why some people pair it with a redirect.

A setup that works for most people#

1. Watch history off, so any home page you do reach is quiet.
2. A Redirect homepage-only rule: *://*.youtube.com/ to https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions.
3. A path rule for youtube.com/shorts to your Focus dashboard.
4. Optionally, a hiding extension for the sidebar and end screen.

If you want to go further and block YouTube during work hours with one learning channel allowed, see how to block YouTube and how to stop the YouTube rabbit hole. Redirect is free for one site, with Pro and Lifetime plans for unlimited sites (see pricing).

Close the tab. Open your goals.

Redirect sends distracting sites to the goals you wrote down, and makes every pause a choice.

Add to Chrome, free to start