How to whitelist a website?

The term “Website Whitelist” refers to the method of preventing requests to untrustworthy websites. With this function, IT admins can create a list of pre-approved websites and push them to the end-user devices. Upon the execution of this policy, end-users will be able to access the pre-approved websites only.

When the user searches on the browser, the domain of each requested website is checked against the whitelist. If the requested domain isn’t identified, the HTTP request is denied before it starts.

Web content filtering policy in Hexnode UEM helps to blacklist and whitelist websites. Whitelist is supported on macOS, iOS, and Android devices. To whitelist a website using Hexnode UEM,

1. Copy the URL of the websites that you want to whitelist.
   A gentle reminder that the URL should start with HTTP://, FTP://, or HTTPS://.
2. Create a whitelist policy. Whitelist policy is created by,
   Policy> New policy> Device OS> Security> Web content filtering> configure> select whitelist> paste the URL that you want to whitelist.
3. Select the target devices where you want to assign the policy.
4. Save the policy.

In macOS, the policy will be applied to the safari browser only. If you want to extend whitelisting to other websites, you can do it with the help of the App configurations policy. Create an XML file with a key attribute – URLBlocklist with the list of websites to restrict. Upload this file to generate app configurations for other browsers.

For iOS, only supervised iOS devices can be whitelisted.

Also, websites may have different versions, such as mobile version, desktop version, and many more. During whitelisting, each of them should be considered as a separate URL.