The complete guide to organizing your links in Chrome

The bookmarks bar fills up. At first it holds five sites. Then it's twenty, with cut-off names, and you end up clicking the arrow at the end to dig through folders you no longer remember creating.

Tabs become your to-do list. You leave open the page you need to check, the unpaid invoice and the article you want to read. With thirty tabs, each one is a tiny icon and closing Chrome feels risky.

Important links live in chats. The client dashboard, the shared folder or the new tool's website arrive by email or Slack. A week later they're buried under hundreds of messages and you ask again.

Saving is the easy part: the star in the address bar or Ctrl+D (Cmd+D on Mac). The trick is the folder. Keep the Bookmarks bar for the four or five sites you open every day and save the rest in Other bookmarks or in a folder of your own.

The hard part is finding it later. That's why it pays to review your folders now and then, remove duplicates and use clear names. If a link needs an extra detail, like a username or a port, keep in mind that Chrome bookmarks don't support notes.

Lots of open tabs aren't a computer memory problem, they're an organization problem: they're half-finished tasks you don't want to lose. The fix is to give them a place to wait without being open.

Chrome helps with tab groups, which put several tabs under one name and color, and it lets you save all your open tabs as bookmarks in a folder. Choose depending on whether you'll need them today or in a week.

Organizing doesn't help much if opening a link takes ten clicks. The fastest way is to stay on the keyboard: type a word in the address bar or use a shortcut.

Chrome suggests the sites you visit often and lets you create search shortcuts for specific sites. Add a few keyboard shortcuts and you can get almost anywhere without touching the mouse.

Chrome has no bookmarks shared between coworkers: everyone saves their own and you end up with different versions of the same link. A doc or a pinned chat message helps, but only as long as someone keeps it up to date.

Ideally you want a single place with everyone's links, available to each person in their browser, where one change reaches the whole team at once.

Not all links are the same. An article you want to read on the weekend doesn't need the same thing as a client dashboard you open every day. For the first there are "read later" apps; for the second, link and tab managers.

If you're thinking about switching tools, these comparisons tell you what each one does well, what it's missing and when it's right for you.

If you work in a team, the Teams plan gives you a shared vault: each link can be visible to the whole company or just one department, and editors' changes wait for an admin's approval. You'll find all the details about links in the links guide.