How to block a website on an iPhone, and why the app limit did not already do it

You put a limit on the app, and now you are reading the same feed in Safari.

Nothing went wrong. An App Limit is attached to an app. Safari is a different app, one you cannot sensibly limit because you need it for train times, and instagram.com is not an app at all. Your rule was never asked about it.

Apple did think of this. There is a field built for exactly this problem, and it is not hidden. It is simply below the fold, at the bottom of a picker that opens on a wall of categories, and the fold is where everybody stops. Two taps and one scroll away from where you have already been.

Start there, because it takes forty seconds.

The field is at the bottom of the app picker, past every category

1. Open the limit you already have. Settings › Screen Time › App Limits, then tap the limit itself, the row that says Social and a number of minutes. Do not tap Add Limit. You want the one you made last month.
2. Tap Edit Apps. It sits under the row of app icons, above the timer. This reopens the same picker you used the first time.
3. Scroll to the bottom. All the way past the categories. Past All Apps & Categories, past Social, Games, Entertainment and the rest of them. The last section on the screen is headed WEBSITES and has one row in it: Add Website.
4. Type the bare domain. instagram.com, not https://www.instagram.com. Hit return. It joins the list above the field, and the field clears itself ready for the next one.
5. Add the rest while you are standing here. Every extra domain is about eight seconds and you will not come back. Four is a realistic number. Forty is a list you abandon on Tuesday.
6. Back, then Done. The limit now covers the app and the site as one thing.

That last line is the entire point, and it is the bit people get wrong when they find this field on their own. Put the website into the limit you already have, not into a new one.

A separate thirty minute limit for instagram.com does not tighten anything. It hands you a second thirty minutes, to be spent in Safari after the app has shut, which is not a limit at all. It is an hour, arranged into two courses.

What you have just built is a budget, not a wall

When the minutes run out, Safari stops loading the page and shows the same pale screen the app shows, with the same buttons underneath it. That is the correct behaviour and it is worth knowing before you rely on it.

Two things decide whether that screen holds.

Whether you set a Screen Time passcode. Without one, the screen offers Ignore Limit and the whole thing costs a single thumb. Go and set one at Settings › Screen Time › Use Screen Time Passcode, then turn on Block at End of Limit inside the limit itself, which is a row that only exists once a passcode does. This is ninety seconds and it matters more than everything else on this page. There are eight other doors like it, and this is the widest.

Whether the thing you want gone is a whole domain. Screen Time works in domains, not paths. You can name youtube.com. You cannot name youtube.com/shorts and leave the rest of YouTube alone, which is what most people actually want and is its own problem with its own answer.

A timer is a fine thing to give a habit you like. It is the wrong shape for one you do not.

The hard block exists. Apple filed it under adult content.

If you do not want twenty minutes of it, you want none of it, there is a second setting that refuses the site outright, with no timer and no button underneath.

Go to Settings › Screen Time › Content & Privacy Restrictions. Turn the switch at the top on. Then Content Restrictions, then Web Content, then pick the middle option, the one Apple calls Limit Adult Websites. Two lists appear underneath it. The second one is NEVER ALLOW, with an Add Website row, and it will take any domain you type.

That heading is the whole reason nobody finds this. You are not looking for a pornography filter, so you never open the screen, so you never learn that the Never Allow list has no opinion about what you put in it. reddit.com is as welcome there as anything else.

Two side effects come with that middle option, and both are worth knowing before you flip it.

Apple's own filter switches on at the same time, so it will start guessing about sites you never named. Most of the guesses are fine and the occasional one is not, which is what the ALWAYS ALLOW list directly above is for. When something legitimate gets refused, add it there and move on.

And Private Browsing disappears from Safari while web content is limited. If you have ever used a private tab to get around your own rule, that hole closes as a side effect of this one setting, which is a better bargain than it sounds.

Domains, subdomains, and the ones that still get through

Add the bare domain first, then spend one minute trying to defeat yourself. Open Safari and try the site three ways: reddit.com, www.reddit.com, and old.reddit.com. Facebook has m.facebook.com. Twitter answers to two names entirely. If one of them loads, add that exact form to the list too.

This sounds pedantic and takes sixty seconds. It is also the difference between a block and a block with a doorbell on it, because the version of you who finds the gap at eleven at night will only need to find it once.

The second browser is the hole, and it takes ninety seconds to close

Everything above is enforced by iOS on the phone's own web content. What it cannot do is stop you installing a browser that has never heard of any of it.

So: delete the ones you are not using. Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave, whichever you added for a reason you cannot now remember. Then go to Settings › Screen Time › Content & Privacy Restrictions › iTunes & App Store Purchases, tap Installing Apps and set it to Don't Allow.

The App Store icon leaves your home screen when you do that. That is not a bug, it is the point, and it costs you the ability to install anything at all until you go back and turn it off. For most people that is an annoyance twice a year.

You have now spent twelve minutes on a screen six inches tall

Add it up. Forty seconds in the App Limit, two minutes in Never Allow, a minute testing subdomains, ninety seconds on the passcode, ninety seconds on the browsers. Call it twelve with the interruptions. The phone is genuinely sorted.

Then you close the phone and there is a laptop on the table with a keyboard and a much better screen and none of this on it.

Screen Time will carry your limits across if you turn on Share Across Devices, and on a Mac it does a reasonable job inside Safari. It does considerably less inside Chrome, Arc, Firefox and Edge, which is where most people actually browse, and a browser extension is two clicks from being removed by the person who installed it. That is a longer job and a different one, and skipping it is why a phone-only answer usually lasts about eleven days.

Every switch above is guarded by four digits you already know

Read back through what you just did. Not one of those settings makes the site less appealing at eleven at night. Every single one is you, in a calm and reasonable mood, hiding the keys from yourself for later.

That works, right up until the evening you decide it should not. And undoing it is not hard. It is Settings › Screen Time, four digits, one toggle, about twenty seconds, and there is nothing at any point in those twenty seconds that asks you whether you meant it.

That third party can be a person. Hand your partner the Screen Time passcode and make them type it in. It works extremely well and it costs you something socially every single time, which is precisely why it works.

Or it can be something built to behave like one, and here is where we admit that we make one. Scrappy is a small dog who stands in front of the apps you name. Knock once and he is polite about it. Knock four times and he is standing on the doorknob barking. He does not have your Screen Time passcode, because he does not want it.

Getting past him costs a treat, and treats come from walking, roughly two thousand steps for one, worth five minutes. They are not for sale and never will be. Apps you are serious about can be set to absolute, which means he will not take the treat at all. And the removal lock closes the delete-and-reinstall loop, because switching it off takes a day, which is deliberately longer than an urge lasts.

He guards apps, so he is not a replacement for the Never Allow list. He is the other half. You spend twelve minutes doing the settings above so the browser cannot hand it back, and then he handles the part where you change your mind. The Mac version is being built and will do the same job on the bigger screen. It is not out yet, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.