Add to Favourites button – A simple trick to get more people to bookmark your website

When someone adds your website to their favourite list (Also known as bookmarking it) they are able to find it easily whenever they want to again in the future.

This is great for you because it gives you another chance of getting a visit from them, and it is also good for them because it gives them another chance to see more of your content in future, which they might otherwise miss out on.

Hopefully they will add your website to their favourites list and visit it again on a regular basis, but there is a very good chance that they will not think about it, and once they have left your website they might not be able to find it again even if they want too!

(Remember not everyone is as good at going through their own recent search history to find a previously visited website as you might be!)

So in an ideal world we should not only be asking them to bookmark our website (add to favourites list) but we should also be helping them to do it if they find it difficult to do so themselves.

When I first started using Google Chrome browser I could never remember how to add a website to my favourites list, and I imagine many others had the same experience, judging by the number of people asking “how to bookmark a website with Google chrome” that I found on various websites.

With a bit of code placed onto our websites we can easily create an “Add to Favourites button” that they can then use to bookmark our pages with a simple two click approach.

In the box below you will find the “Add to Bookmarks JavaScript Code” from the Hostingfanatic.com website that I slightly adapted for my own needs (adapted as in changed colour and text size that’s all)

<a href=”javascript:if(document.all)window.external.AddFavorite(location.href,document.title); else if(window.sidebar)window.sidebar.addPanel (document.title,location.href,”);” mce_href=”javascript:if(document.all)window.external.AddFavorite(location.href,document.title); else if(window.sidebar)window.sidebar.addPanel (document.title,location.href,”);”>Bookmark this page</a>

When first they click on it the “Add to favourites” box pops up and then they simply have to click again to either confirm or cancel the “Add to favourites operation.

Now some people would say that it’s completely unnecessary to have such a request on your pages, and that someone would add your website to their favourites list quite easily on their own if they really wanted to.

However, I don’t see any harm in nudging people to do it just a bit, plus as I have already stated above, not everyone knows how or even thinks to do it until it’s too late and they have already lost your website, and by then it’s too late.

The code above really only works for Internet explorer and Firefox – it might work in other browsers, but most likely it will just do nothing, as is the case with Google chrome.

With Google chrome when a person clicks on the link it appears completely useless, and so simply stating that they should click on the control key and the letter d (as in CTRL+D) is the best way so far to get them to bookmark you easily.

Actually the CTRL+D method works in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Google Chrome, and it is my belief that this easy method would also work in many other browsers too – but I haven’t tried that yet.

It might just be worth me saying “other browser users simply hit “CTRL+D” rather than my current “Chrome users simply hit “CTRL+D”.

Let me know how the “Add to Favourites code” works for you and what you think.

Tags: Add to Bookmarks JavaScript Code, Add to Favourites, Add to Favourites button, Add to Favourites code