What to do if your Windows 7 taskbar is filling up with pinned IE9 sites

Site pinning is a great feature in Internet Explorer 9, and I use it all the time. I have a host of sites pinned to my taskbar such as Facebook and Hotmail, but also some internal apps we use in the office for things like internal product news. These sites appear just like a locally-installed app which makes them much more accessible for me.

However, it’s easy to get carried away and start pinning sites like there’s no tomorrow, even sites you actually only visit once in a blue moon. Which means of course that your taskbar in Windows 7 can get pretty crowded – so what to do?

Here’s my personal approach. It might work for you, it might not. If you have a better system please do let me know.

1. For sites I use less frequently, but still want quick access to, I pin to the Start menu instead. You can do this simply by dragging them to the Start button instead of the task bar – they will appear at the top of your start menu, nicely separated from other items. You can still access the jumplist items, these now appear as fly-outs instead
2. But what if you’ve already pinned the site to your taskbar and find you’re not using it as often as you thought you would…and so feel it would be better in the Start menu? In this case, ensure the site is closed and hold down shift while right-clicking on the icon in the taskbar. You’ll have an option to “Pin to Start Menu”. Once you’ve done that, right click again on the icon in the taskbar and choose “Unpin this program from taskbar”.

This approach allows me to keep my taskbar uncluttered but still have all of the sites that are important to me available as pinned sites, with all the advantages that brings.