To block access to a website from your Android smartphone you can use Parental Control or an ad hoc application: here’s how
There are several reasons to block a site and prevent access via a device. The first, and most obvious, is to prevent children and minors from accessing sites with content not appropriate for their age: porn and violence in the first place. But even at work, perhaps on a company smartphone, it is useful to block browsing on specific Web addresses.
The reasons to block one or more sites, then, are several. There are also several ways to do it: you can block sites through the Parental Control of the Android operating system, but also through browser extensions and through specific apps. Finally, but this is not their main purpose, even the main Android antivirus software often integrates a feature to block a list of websites deemed unsafe.
How to block sites via browser
Browser extensions that allow you to block one or more sites while browsing with your Android smartphone are numerous. One very useful, effective and convenient to use is BlockSite for Firefox. This add-on can be found by opening the Mozilla browser and tapping on the menu with the three dots at the top right. Then you have to select Add-on and search among the recommended extensions for the word BlockSite (all combined). The add-on that interests us is the first one that appears: install it and grant it permission to access the list of Web addresses you visit. At this point, from the settings of BlockSite, we can add one by one all the sites that we want to block. BlockSite is also available as an app, which allows us to use it if we prefer to browse with other browsers.
Google Family Link
Google Family Link is an Android app designed to restrict children’s access to certain sites. You can set the block at a certain time of the day (for example, when we come home from work and our young children start playing with our smartphone) or throughout the day. It’s also possible to manage the time of use and access to apps, banning or restricting some of them.
Block access to sites with antivirus
The site-blocking feature built into many antivirus programs was created to prevent access to websites that carry malware. But it can also be used for “clean” sites that we still want to block for the reasons already explained. The Trend Micro Mobile Security & Antivirus app for Android, for example, provides a browsing filter (independent of the browser used), which offers three very useful features: the list of blocked sites (which we can edit), the list of approved sites (which we can also edit) and the history of blocked sites. This last feature is useful to know if, in our absence, someone has tried to access one of the blocked sites.