Hello Wonder Woman

Go to Settings > Home page.

Under the Firefox Home Content section, you can uncheck the boxes for Shortcuts and Recent activity. This will prevent Firefox from showing any shortcuts based on your browsing history.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/customize-items-on-firefox-new-tab-page#w_shortcuts

Hello George,

 Thank you so much for your reply.  I'm embarrassed that I didn't scroll down far enough to see the other radio box option for Recent Activity.  I think unchecking that did the trick, thank you so much!

I spoke too soon, the recently visited sites are still showing up in my homepage shortcuts. I hope someone can help. Thanks.

I think you must clear your history for that

My browser is set to clear everything each time I close it so that's not it.

Unchecking the "Shortcuts" box will remove the shortcuts from the homepage and I don't want that, I want those shortcuts to stay there without adding anything that I don't specifically save. I see that the setting says "Sites you save or visit" under "Shortcuts" so they have apparently changed it to include any visited site because it never used to do that. How rude. Visited sites can always be found under History/Recently closed tabs anyway. I do not want to save these sites to my bookmarks bar, I already have a plethora of bookmarks, some of which I have in folders because I have so many. I guess we have to settle for this just being forced upon us?

Just updated to 143.0.4 and sites I visit are still automatically being added to my homepage shortcuts. Is there any way to stop this? This must be something new because I haven't had this happen before.

Hello, Wonder Woman. How sad that your quest has not yielded any workable solutions. I share the problem and the frustration. I thought perhaps pinning my saves could help, but fat chance. Turns out, vendor sites I visited 3 times are more relevant than something I saved manually and actually pinned, funny that.