Do you have an old iPad lying around that you actually no longer use because it has become very slow? Sin! You can make your iPad faster with the tips and tricks in this article.
While you shouldn’t expect miracles – a slow iPad doesn’t suddenly become lightning fast – it is possible to achieve some speed gains. However, it is difficult to make this speed difference measurable. We list a number of tips. The settings may be slightly different for each iOS / iPadOS version.
Refresh in the background
An often mentioned tip is to close apps in the multitask bar. This is nonsense. Apps are ‘frozen’ in the background, they do not consume system resources. It’s different when those apps download information in the background. You can imagine that when thirty apps are constantly requesting new information, this has an impact on the speed of your iPad. You switch this off via Settings / General / Background apps refresh. You can choose whether to disable refresh completely or only for certain apps. We would do the latter, because the apps you often use are still ready for you when you open them. It must of course remain user-friendly.
Storage capacity
Is your iPad packed with apps, videos and music? Then it can be worthwhile to tidy up a bit. However, this is only useful if, for example, there is less than 1 GB free space on your iPad. If you have a few GB left, it is not necessary to delete things.
Browser cache
One measure that does not affect the overall speed of your iPad, but does affect the speed of Safari, is to empty the browser cache. Ironically, cache is actually meant to make the internet experience faster, but that only applies to the sites you visit more often. A full cache can actually slow down surfing. You put this in Settings / Safari / Clear cookies and data. (or Clear history and website data)
Notifications
Great fun, all those apps that can send you notifications when there is something to report, but for how many apps that is really necessary. And that while it consumes quite a lot of system resources. You enable notifications off Settings / Notification center. In iOS / iPadOS versions, this heading is possible Reporting called. Under the cup Including or Notification style you can indicate from which apps you no longer need to receive notifications.
How much does that really make a difference?
Unfortunately, you don’t just turn a slow iPad into a speed beast, it’s better to switch to a newer model. But your iPad can really get a little faster. The previous tips are written from our own experiences. Our iPad Air really feels faster when we perform the aforementioned actions.
But can we substantiate this claim? We loaded our iPad Air to the brim with content and then ran the Geekbench benchmark tool. After performing all of the ‘gear actions’ from this article, Geekbench does not indicate any significant differences. The iPad performs slightly better, but most results fall within the margin of error of such a benchmark. So proof? No, not that. But the above measures theoretically and provide the feeling for a faster tablet. And the latter is the most important.
A second life
Do the tips in this article not give the desired effect and has your iPad not become noticeably faster? Don’t throw your tablet away after all. In many cases you can give your iPad a second life without getting annoyed by the slow device. For example, you can use an old tablet as a second screen or as a remote control, so that in principle it is not so noticeable that your iPad is a bit slower. You can also turn your tablet into an alarm clock or a photo frame in an instant.
