Is your iPad slowing down? Here’s what you can do to help speed it up.

The popularity of Apple’s iPads didn’t come for the tech giant randomly. It came because of their innovation with tablets. Imagine having something very similar to our beloved iPhones, BUT bigger!

2010 gave us one of the tablet world’s best inventions — the iPad. Just in the third quarter of 2021, Apple shipped out around 12.9 million units of their sought-after iPad. This includes sales for all models like the iPad Pro, iPad Air, and iPad Mini.

These days, iPads are used for a variety of things. People use them for streaming their favorite Netflix shows, drawing digital art, reading books, and using it (almost) like a laptop because of its well-rounded features.

If you own an iPad, you can’t deny how useful it is for day-to-day tasks. It has all the abilities of the iPhone on a bigger screen. That sounds very convenient!

But what if your beloved iPad suddenly slows down and becomes the opposite of convenient?

I believe this is something experienced by a big portion of iPad users, so I prepared a nice little guide that’ll help them speed up their iPads when it starts to slow down.

1. Restart

With computers, cell phones, and every electronic device out there, the first thing that comes into a user’s mind when it slows down or encounters any hiccup is to do a reset.

A restart could be a simple restart by pressing the right buttons.

In the case of your iPad, if you feel it acting slower than it should, you won’t lose anything by turning it off and then turning it back on after a few seconds.

You won’t believe how big of a change a good restart can do for your iPad or any of your devices for that matter.

Even non-tech wizards know the first measure in treating any gadget hiccup is to restart it before unplugging, unscrewing, or throwing parts — or the device itself — in the garbage.

If a few restarts didn’t cut it, don’t worry. There are plenty of things you can try (I promise they’re 100% safe).

2. Close apps running in the background

There are times when iPads, even the latest ones, run slowly because you’re running too many applications at the same time. Maybe you’re not using all of them, but I know you don’t really fully exit the apps you use.

Because why should you? You reduce the loading time by a second or less when you leave your apps open and running in the background. But at the expense of speed!

If that’s not enough to make you do the easy job of closing apps in the background to make sure your iPad runs as fast as it should, then you should know that running too many apps heats up your beloved tablet.

When you’re using your iPad, make sure you’re only running the apps you’re using at the moment. Close the apps you used yesterday.

And please, shut the apps off before dozing off to prevent the slow loading speeds we all hate so much.

3. Free up storage

It’s easy to be trigger-happy with downloading apps from the App Store because of the ease of access and how appetizing some apps look. I admit that I do this too, but changed my ways when I got storage space warnings.

So do the work of deleting applications you don’t use anymore. In case you need them in the future, downloading is as easy as tapping the blue button in the App Store.

Aside from apps, there’s also stuff like pictures, videos, and emails clogging your iPad and causing it to slow down. Back up the things important to you and delete them from your iPad to free up some space.

Simply put, I’d like to tell you that your iPad needs to breathe sometimes.

4. Delete your browser data

If you’re not using other browsers, you’re on Safari. To open websites and show you whatever is in them, your iPad needs to store data. For the current viewing and for the times you’ll visit the website in the future.

As with all data, browsing data takes space. Especially if you don’t clear your history and data for years! Yikes.

It’s not complicated to clear your browsing data. Just go to Safari (or any other browser you use on your iPad), and find the tab for browsing history, and hit delete for all categories you want to clean up (I recommend everything but saved passwords). 

Make sure you delete from the beginning and not just data from the past hour.

5. Disable automatic app updates

Are there times when you’re unable to launch your iPad apps and the icons are grayed out? Multiple apps doing this causes your iPad to slow down because of multiple applications downloading and installing data.

If this happens, it means they’re updating without you knowing. By default, you might have the automatic app updates on.

So turn it off in Settings > App Store, then toggle the app update under the automatic downloads section off.

Now, you can update your apps only when YOU want to. Not in the middle of you making use of them.

Speed matters

You might be using your iPad for the simplest things, but I know that it matters for you when it loads fast and opens up applications for you at good speeds.

That’s why taking small steps to make sure it performs at consistent levels and avoids stressing you out matters.

But if you’ve done anything you can to improve the loading times of your iPad and nothing changed, it’s time to visit your local iPad repair store for a professional check-up.

Worry not, for iPad (and other gadgets) diagnostics are mostly done by repair technicians free. Just find an iPad repair store you can trust to fix your device in your area.