How To Block Websites On Your Windows 10 PC

So much of our life is digital today. We visit tens of websites every day to consume and share information. But the sites we visit might not be appropriate for our kids.

If you share your Windows 10 PC with your kids, it’s a good idea to block access to certain websites on your PC.

While there are tens of free and commercial software around to block websites on a PC, you can use the built-in hosts file to block URLs on your Windows PC. Just by adding URLs of a website to the host file, you can block that website on your PC. None of the browsers installed on your PC will be able to open those blocked websites.

Here are two easy ways to block websites on your Windows 10 PC by editing the hosts file.

Block websites by manually editing the hosts file in Windows 10

As said, you can block websites on your Windows 10 PC without installing any additional software. All you need to do is edit the hosts file. Here is how to do just that.

Step 1: Open the Notepad program as administrator. To do so, type Notepad in Start/taskbar search field to see Notepad program in search results, right-click on the Notepad entry, and then click Run as administrator.

Click Yes button when you see the User Account Control prompt.

Step 2: At the Notepad program window, click File menu, click Open, change the file type from Text Documents to All Files (see picture below). Navigate to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc (where “C” is the drive letter of your Windows 10 install drive), and select the hosts file.

Click the Open button to open the file with Notepad.

Step 3: Once the hosts file is opened with Notepad, add the URL of websites that you want to block access to on your PC in the following way:

127.0.0.1 www.bing.com

127.0.0.1 www.google.com

Step 4: Finally, click the File menu and then click Save option (Ctrl+S) to save the changes. That’s it!

Try to open one of these URLs in any of the web browsers on your PC now. None of the blocked websites will load on your PC from now on.

To unblock websites again, follow the instructions mentioned above and remove website entries from the hosts file. Save the file.

Use URL Blocker to block websites in Windows 10

If you are not comfortable manually editing the hosts file, you can use this tiny URL Blocker utility to block websites on your Windows 10 PC. The URL Blocker allows you edit the hosts file without opening the hosts file. Here is how to use URL Blocker to block websites in Windows 10.

Step 1: Get URL Blocker from this page.

Step 2: Run URL Blocker by double-clicking on its executable as it doesn’t require an installation. If Windows 10 warns you against running this program, please run the program by ignoring the warning.

Step 3: Click the field, type the URL of the website which you want to block on your PC and then click Add button. You can add as many websites as you want.

Once done, click the Apply button. You will be asked to log off and sign in again. Please do so to block all added websites. Good luck!

To unblock websites, run URL Blocker again, select websites which you want to unblock, click Delete button and finally, click Apply. Log off and log in again.