Your employees form the foundation of your organization and it’s productivity and lack of it that can make or break your company. The increasing digitalization of almost every official task assuring easy access to online usage has raised several concerns among the employers. There have been cases where employers have been startled to discover that their staffs are abusing the office internet facility in their personal or entertainment reasons. This is a serious blow to the office operations and if not checked in time can even lead to deadline misses. Thus, it’s crucial that, as the employer, you only allow the websites needed for official purposes and block off the other ones. The post below discusses on how to block websites in Windows.

Before getting into the website-blocking guidelines, it must be noted that there are two major ways to block websites in Windows. One is through hosts file and another is through software. By software, it implies employee monitoring software applications that are designed to monitor and block off the needed websites on the office computers.

1. Blocking websites through host file

If you are looking for an inexpensive option, you can go for blocking through hosts file as the process is completely free of charge. Hosts file can be described as some plain text-file utilized by Windows for mapping the IP addresses & hostnames- it can redirect domain names straight back to local computer & essentially blocks off the needed site. The process is really simple & enables effective website blocking, irrespective of browsers & time of web usage.

The steps:

· First enter — “C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc” on the search bar of Windows. Also, you can navigate to that folder via click through the Windows Explorer.

· Now, double-click on “hosts” & select “Notepad” while asked to pick a program for opening the file. Alternatively, one can even launch “Notepad” & navigate to host file through picking “File>Open” & locating “C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc” in computer’s directory.

· As you open Notepad, you would find several lines for mapping. Go to last line (which states about local host) and enter “127.0.0.1″, followed by a press on spacebar. Then, type down the right IP address for the site you are planning to block off on same line. Suppose you wish to block Facebook- so type “127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com”.

· The same method would be applicable for all other sites you plan to block. Start the command with “127.0.0.1.”, get a space & then type the site URL. Use “www” only & do not apply “http” ever unless you wish to render an invalid entry.

· Click on “File” in upper-left section & choose “Save”. Never change save location or name. Ignore warnings concerning edits on hosts file. Now, Close the Notepad.

· Open up a web browser to check the results. If you are successful with the block procedure, you will receive a completely black page if you try to access the sites blocked.

2. Blocking websites through employee monitoring software

You must be careful to settle with a highly reviewed and top rated employee monitoring software.

· First, download & install your chosen employee monitoring software.

· Click on the tab saying “Block Websites”.

· Click on “Add” button to activate the command.

· A box would come up where you would need to place the site address. So, enter the site URL you wish to block, say –www.facebook.com. Some of the leading employee monitoring software applications even allow to place the entire site category- like “Social Networking”, instead of individual site addresses.

· Click on “OK” & you are done.