iPhone running slow? From clearing cache to updating software, 5 ways to speed up your Apple smartphone

Your Apple iPhone might be one of the fastest mobile phones available today, thanks to Apple’s excellent hardware and software optimisations and regular updates. But no piece of technology is perfect, and just like any other smartphone, the iPhone can occasionally get slow and difficult to use. While many users take it as a sign that their phone needs to be upgraded or that it is time to try a factory reset, this is not always the case. Sometimes, all the phone needs is a bit of cleaning and optimising settings to speed it up again.

From clearing your phone’s cache and freeing up space to installing the latest updates and checking the battery, here are a few easy ways to speed up your iPhone without spending any money. Before spending your money on a brand new device or factory reset your iPhone, read on to know more about keeping your iPhone running smoothly as the day you first bought it.

Also read: Looking for a smartphone? Check Mobile Finder here.

Reboot your iPhone: While this might sound ridiculous, many iPhone users do not restart their phones for months, which can lead to all sorts of issues on the phone. If a badly configured app is running in the background, it might slow down some other processes and consume more resources, which can also cause battery drain. Rebooting your phone can sometimes help fix those misbehaving apps.

Clear your device cache: As you use your phone, apps like Safari keep accumulating data in a cache, to prevent the same files and photos from loading when you visit a site again. However, these can soon accumulate and slow down your phone. In order to quickly get rid of the unwanted cache (and free up your iPhone storage in the process) head over to Settings > Safari > Clear History and Website Data.

Update your iPhone software: Apple regularly releases smaller updates (point releases) for its iPhone devices, the current version is iOS 14.6 at the time of publishing this. These smaller updates are also important because they fix bugs that are discovered as well as patch security flaws. Some of these bugs allow apps to use too much memory and slow down your phone, so updating your device could actually help speed it up. You can visit Settings > General > Software update to check for pending updates.

Disable Background App Refresh: Do you have a lot of apps installed on your phone? If you have an older iPhone, allowing apps to refresh data in the background can slow down your phone and eat up your battery. Instead, you can go to Settings > General > Background App Refresh and toggle off all the apps you don’t want running in the background.

Check your iPhone battery: Your iPhone is a powerful smartphone, and the processor can be very power-hungry. Over time, as your battery capacity degrades with multiple charge cycles, the performance can slow down iOS draws less power from the battery to prevent random shutdowns. If you find your iPhone slowing down over time, you can check your battery health in the Settings app, then take it to a service centre to replace the battery.