By Justin Carver · Updated August 2026 · Productivity for Teachers and Students
Google Classroom, Canvas, school email, the library catalog, the six sites the district pays for. I built a free page that puts all of them one click away — and below, how to actually make it open on a school Chromebook.
Homepage, home page, start page - people mean the same thing by all three: the page your browser opens first. It earns its place in a classroom if it does five things:
Best Homepage Ever does all five. I built it and I run it on my own, so I know exactly what it does and doesn't do — including the parts below where the honest answer is “you can't, and here's why.”
First off, I'm not a teacher. I've never run a classroom, or even used a Chromebook. I've also never had thirty kids wait on me while I pulled up a website or login page. I just wanted to help contribute, even in a small way, to help educators and/or students organize their educational resources into a single website.
So I am an amateur that saw a fun reason to open up my project to a specific niche of people - teachers and students.
It's tempting to look at a school's software and conclude something is missing. I don't think anything is. Classroom handles assignments. Canvas and Schoology handle courses. Drive handles files. Each is better at its job than anything I could build, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
The gap is in front of them. Every one of those tools lives at a URL somebody has to find first. Whether it's an organization gap, or just a way to keep students clear of distractions, I think my site may be useful, that's why I'm going to begin offering students and teachers added benefits to using my site. And, I plan on making it better and more catered as time goes on.
And, as a kicker, each student can design their own classroom (or school) homepage.
A start page is just the answer to "where do I click." And, I really thought it might be useful for students to have a centralized place to access their most-used educational resources.
Keep it to what gets used in a normal week. A student page that tries to hold everything becomes another thing to search through.
The irony with all of this, is I created this site 20 years ago for myself, for this exact reason!
A teacher's version is a different page, because the job is different. Alongside the school links, the ones I'd expect to matter:
There's a second reason to keep a deliberate page as a teacher: it's what the class sees. A homepage covered in ads, or one that shows a personalized news feed, is on the projector too.
On a personal machine, ads on a homepage are an annoyance. On a school device they're a different problem, for three reasons.
My homepage carries no ads at all, nor pop-ups, which is the main reason I thought it might be worth writing this. That's also a fair thing to be skeptical about, so open it and explore it yourself.
Two settings, in whichever browser the school issues:
Those are separate settings in every browser, which is why changing one often looks like it did nothing. I wrote a step-by-step guide for every browser, and a longer walkthrough for Chrome and Firefox.
On a managed device you may not be able to change either — many districts lock browser settings by policy. If that's your situation, a bookmark on the bar does most of the same work.
This is the question I get asked in the most different ways, and the honest answer has three parts — because a Chromebook handed out by a school behaves differently from one bought at a store.
besthomepageever.com and
click Add.
This is a separate setting, which is why changing the startup page often looks like it did nothing. Go to Settings → Appearance, turn on Show home button, and enter the same URL. Now the house icon goes where you want instead of to Google.
Chrome has no setting that lets you type a custom URL for the new tab page. Not on ChromeOS, not anywhere. Every guide that tells you to “set your new tab page in Settings” is describing a menu that doesn't exist in Chrome. The only supported way to change it is an extension, so I built a free one that does exactly that and nothing else.
On a district-enrolled Chromebook, an administrator can lock the startup page, the home button, and extension installs by policy. When that's happening the settings are still visible but greyed out, usually with a small building icon and “Managed by your organization” next to them.
It helps to know the lock isn't aimed at you. San Diego Unified alone deployed more than 47,000 Chromebooks, and at that scale settings get set centrally because there is no other way to run it — nobody is walking 47,000 machines through a settings menu. (Google Education Blog)
You can check in about ten seconds:
chrome://management in
the address bar — it tells you whether the device is
enrolled, and who manages it.
chrome://policy to see
the specific rules being applied. If
RestoreOnStartupURLs or
NewTabPageLocation appears
in that list, those settings are being set for you and you
can't override them from inside Chrome.
If that's your situation, don't fight it — a bookmark on the bookmarks bar gets you most of the same benefit in one click, and it doesn't require anyone's permission. If you're the teacher and you want it across a whole cart of devices, the request that actually works is asking your IT admin to add the URL to the startup pages policy for that device group. That's a small change on their side, and it's one they make routinely.
Honestly, I don't know - maybe. My guess is every school is different, and it depends on how you've set it up for a class. Here is everything I know that's relevant to somebody evaluating this for a school, including the parts that don't help my case.
Worth understanding the incentives here: districts standardise on Chromebooks because it saves real money at real scale — San Diego Unified reported nearly $10 million in savings on its 1:1 rollout (Google Education Blog) — and the same central management that makes that possible is what locks the browser settings. The cost saving and the greyed-out menu are two sides of one decision.
None of that stops a teacher using it for their own page on their own computer, which is how most people reading this will use it.
Here's the honest part. My site wasn't built for schools, and I don't know which of these would actually help. I have guesses, and they're likely to change as I hear from teachers and students.
I genuinely don't know if any of that is useful or if it solves a problem nobody has. If you teach, or you're the person who sets up the machines, tell me what would actually help. I read everything that comes in, and it's the only way this page gets better than my best guess.
Yes. Everything described on this page is free, and you don't need an account to start - your links save in the browser. An account is only needed if you want the same setup to follow you to another device.
Yes. It's a website, not an app or an extension, so it runs in Chrome on ChromeOS the same as anywhere else. You can set it as the page Chrome opens on startup, and as the home button. The new tab page is the exception — Chrome has no setting for a custom new tab URL, so that one needs the free extension. On a district-managed Chromebook an admin can lock all of these by policy.
No, and it isn't trying to. Those handle assignments, grading, and rosters. This is the page you land on first, with a link straight into whichever of them your school uses.
Yes. Homepage, home page, and start page all describe the page your browser opens, and people use them interchangeably. The one worth separating is the new tab page, which is a different browser setting - changing your home page does not change it.
Two different reasons, and it's worth knowing which one
you're hitting. First, Chrome has no built-in setting for a
custom new tab URL for anyone - that's not a school
restriction, it's how Chrome works, and it's why the only
supported way to change it is an extension. Second, if the
extension itself won't install, your device is enrolled and
an administrator has restricted extensions by policy. Type
chrome://management
in the address bar to see which situation you're in.
Not as a single shared page today - that's the feature I'm most often asked for and it doesn't exist yet. What works now is that each student sets up their own page in a couple of minutes, or you project your own setup once and have the class copy the handful of links that matter. If a shareable class page would actually change whether you'd use this, tell me, because that feedback is what decides what I build next.
No account is needed. Logged out, the links a student adds are stored in that browser on that device and nothing is sent to me. An account exists only so the same setup follows you to a different machine. My privacy policy also states the service isn't directed at anyone under 13, so for elementary use please read it yourself before recommending it to students.
No. There's no Data Privacy Agreement, no approved-vendor listing, no rostering and no admin console. It's a general-audience homepage I build and run on my own. Plenty of teachers use it for their own page on their own machine, which needs none of that - but if your district requires a signed agreement before a site can be put in front of students, this doesn't meet that bar today, and I'd rather tell you now.
No. It's a general-audience homepage that I build and run on my own. There's no school agreement, no district onboarding, and no classroom-specific account type. If you're considering it for students, or yourself, make sure it's okay to use it in your school.