Frequently Asked Questions

Press the Button is a free, one-click random site picker. Press the button and it opens one of 217 hand-checked sites — a quiz, an arcade game, a weird photo archive, whatever's next in the mix. No feed, no algorithm, just one press. If you want to narrow things down, six mood chips above the button (Arcade, Quiz, Dilemma, Art, Reflex, and Weird) let you pull from just one slice of the rotation instead of the full list. There's nothing to sign up for and nothing tracked — the whole site is just a button, a shuffled list, and whatever's next.

Every press pulls from a shuffled queue built from the current link list — a method sometimes called a shuffle bag — rather than picking a fresh random site each time. That matters because true independent randomness would let the same site show up twice in a row, or even three times, purely by chance. A shuffle bag avoids that: the full pool gets shuffled once, you work through it one press at a time, and only once you've seen everything in that pass does it reshuffle for the next one. When it does reshuffle, it specifically checks that the very next site isn't the same one you just saw, so a reshuffle can't accidentally put you right back where you started. The shuffle logic runs entirely in your browser, using whatever mood pool is currently active — the full 217-site list, or one of the six narrower chip pools if you've got a mood selected.

The 🎮 Arcade, 🧠 Quiz, ⚖️ Dilemma, 🎨 Art, ⚡ Reflex, and 👻 Weird chips above the button let you narrow the random pool to a single mood instead of pulling from the full 217-site rotation. Every site carries exactly one mood tag, so the six chips add up to the whole list with nothing left out and nothing double-counted — they're a partition of the same pool, not a separate curated list. Only one chip can be active at a time; tapping a second chip swaps to that mood rather than combining the two, since the point is narrowing a big pool down to something that feels specific, and mixing moods would undo that. Tap an active chip again to turn it off and go back to the full random pool. See the blog's field guide to the mood chips for what's actually behind each one.

No — there's no sign-up, no login, and nothing to remember between visits. Open the site in any browser and the button works immediately; there's no profile being built in the background, either. That's a deliberate design choice, not just a missing feature: an account would mean somewhere to store history, preferences, or behavior, and Press the Button specifically avoids keeping any of that. Every visit starts from the same blank state — the site doesn't know whether you've been here before, what you've pressed in the past, or which mood chips you tend to use. If you close the tab and come back later, it's functionally a fresh session every time, which is also why there's no way to save a history of what you've seen or sync anything across devices.

Yes — on any modern phone or tablet browser, with no app to install and nothing to download. The layout and touch targets are built mobile-first, so buttons, the mood chips, and the "open in a new tab" fallback panel are all sized and spaced for a thumb on a touchscreen rather than being a desktop layout shrunk down to fit. Because it's just a website rather than an app, there's also nothing to update — whatever's live on the site is what you get, with no app-store version lagging behind. The only mobile-specific limitation is the same one that applies on desktop: a handful of embedded sites that block being loaded inside another page will open in a new tab instead, which on mobile just means switching tabs rather than seeing an in-page frame.

Roughly 1 in 3 of the sites in the rotation block being embedded inside another page — a security setting most sites use called X-Frame-Options. We check for this ahead of time by reading each site's actual response headers rather than guessing, so instead of showing you a blank screen, those specific sites show an "Open in a new tab" button instead. Sites like CrazyGames, Newgrounds, and JetPunk fall into this group, among others. The check isn't run on every single press — it's done when a site is added or periodically re-verified — so if a site changes its policy later, the classification can occasionally lag behind until the next check.

Every link is tested before it goes live — we don't copy an old "bored button" list and hope it still works. If a site is dead, has a broken security certificate, or has gone offline, it doesn't make the cut. Across the batches added so far, 9 candidates have been rejected during testing: a couple of expired domains, one revoked security certificate, and one site that had simply vanished with no trace. The ones that do make it in get re-checked periodically, not just once, since a site that's fine today can go dark months later. See our About page for the full numbers behind that process.

Yes — use the Contact page and pick "Suggest a site to add." We read every suggestion that comes in, though not every suggestion makes it into the rotation: the same vetting applies to a suggested site as to anything else — does it load reliably, is its security certificate valid, and does it still actually do the thing it's being suggested for. A site that fails any of those doesn't get added, regardless of how it was found. There's no guaranteed turnaround time since vetting happens periodically alongside other updates rather than the moment a suggestion arrives, but a good suggestion for a mood category that's thin — Reflex and Art are the smallest right now — is more likely to get picked up quickly than one for a category that's already well covered.

Let us know through the Contact page — we'd rather fix it than leave it in the rotation. Every site is checked before it's added, but a site that was live and working when it was vetted can still go down, change its structure, or get replaced by something else entirely months later, and there's no way to catch that automatically in real time. When a broken link gets reported, it's checked again and either removed from the rotation or, if it was a temporary outage, left in place and re-checked again shortly after. A report with the specific site name or URL and roughly what went wrong (blank page, error message, redirected somewhere unexpected) gets handled faster than a general "something's broken" message, since it skips the step of having to guess which of the 217 sites it was.

No. Press the Button has no accounts, no analytics tracking, and doesn't log which sites you land on. Your browser fetches the link list and picks one locally — nothing about your presses is sent anywhere. There's no database behind the site recording what you've clicked or how often you've visited; the entire state of the app lives in your browser tab and disappears the moment you close it. The only network request the site itself makes is fetching the list of links — everything after that, including which one you land on, happens entirely on your device. See our Privacy Policy for the full breakdown.

We test that each site loads, isn't dead, and has a valid security certificate before it's added, and we re-check periodically after that — but once you're on a third-party site, we don't control what that site does, what ads it shows, or where its own links go. We can't vouch for every ad network or outbound link on someone else's page, the same way no directory or search engine can fully vouch for every result it returns. Use the same normal judgment you'd use browsing anywhere else on the web — avoid downloading anything a page prompts you to install, and treat any site asking for personal information or payment with the skepticism you'd apply on any unfamiliar site, regardless of how you got there. If a specific site seems actively malicious rather than just low-quality, report it through the Contact page so it can be pulled from the rotation.

No cookies, no tracking pixels, and no third-party analytics or advertising scripts run on this site itself — beyond, obviously, whatever the third-party pages you're sent to when you press the button choose to run on their own domains, which is outside our control. That means there's nothing here setting a session ID, nothing remembering your mood-chip preference between visits, and nothing building a browsing profile tied to you across sessions. The one piece of local state the site does use is purely functional and temporary: the shuffled list of sites currently in your queue lives in your browser's memory for that tab only, so it can avoid repeating a site you just saw — and it's gone the moment you close the tab, not saved anywhere, not sent anywhere, and not readable by us or anyone else.