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iPhone and iPadHow to Speed Up an Old iPhone | 11 Quick and Simple Tips

How to Speed Up an Old iPhone | 11 Tips

By Jennifer | Last Updated

In this post, we will study several quick and simple tips on How to Speed Up an Old iPhone. You may find that your iPhone gets slower and slower for a variety of reasons after using for a period of time. The common causes are not enough free space on your device, outdated version of iOS, too many accumulated junk files and so on. In this case, you must be very eager to know how to make old iPhone faster. Read on and learn how to boost your device's performance and bring your tired iPhone back to life.

speed up an old iphone

Tip 1: Free Up More Space on iPhone

If the storage is going to be run out of on your device, there is no doubt that your iPhone will be more and more sluggish in use. Under this circumstance, you should release more space for your iPhone in order to make your old iPhone run faster, such as deleting or moving unnecessary photos and videos to cloud storage, uninstalling apps that you never or hardly used, removing old text messages or cleaning up junk files from your device.

If you don't know where to start, you can go to Settings > General and tap on iPhone Storage. Then you will come to a page where you can check how much space you are using and what's taking the most space on your device. You may see several recommendations to free up more space under the iPhone Storage chart. If you want to apply some of them, click the Enable button beside the option to go ahead.

manage iphone storage

Alternatively, you can use the third party tool to make the old iPhone faster. iSunshare iDevice Genius is a powerful iPhone cleaning tool that can help you to free up iPhone storage. You can clean up the junk files and delete the large files/pictures to release the space. Besides, it is also an effective way to uninstall the app.

You can check its tutorial to free up space on old iPhone and make it faster.

manage iphone storage

Tip 2: Clear Safari's History, Cookies and Other Browsing Data

It is not strange that iPhone users almost use Safari every day. It will generate lots of caches in the browser, which will take some space of your device. So the next tip for you to speed your old iPhone is to empty Safari's history, cookies and data. Cleaning Safari and other browser cookie and data are pretty helpful to make your iPhone run faster. Well, how to clear them? Go to Settings, tap the option of Safari, and then click Clear History and Website Data to proceed. Later there will be a warning message popping up on the iPhone screen, tap Clear History and Data to make sure.

clear safari history and data

Tip 3: Restart Your Device to Have a Try

Many iPhone users find a common phenomenon that some small errors and issues with the iPhone devices can be simply fixed by performing a restart on the device. In general situations, the method is turned out to be effective. By the same token, if you face the issue that your device gets much slower and slower than before, you can have a try to restart your device to troubleshoot some possible causes. How you do this will depend on which iPhone model you are using. If you don't know how to do it, refer to here to get the detailed instructions.

Tip 4: Update Your iOS to the Latest Version

If you discover that your device's performance has been slowed down, one of the possible reasons may be that you are running an iOS version which is out of date. Updating to the latest version of iOS may go some way to fix any issue you are experiencing with your iPhone. In order to avoid this cause, you can check your device for updates by tapping Settings > General > Software Update. If you're instructed there is any update available, what you should do is to download and install these updates right now and to complete the process according to the guidance appearing on the iPhone screen.

check your device for updates

Tip 5: Update Your Apps from App Store

As we all know, old apps may not run as smoothly or quickly as the newest ones. If you want to make your old iPhone run faster, you can check if you've got app pending updates from the App Store. To do this, open the app of App Store on your device, tap your profile icon at the top of the screen to continue, and then click Update next to an app option to update only that app, or you can tap Update All to update all the apps at one time.

Tip 6: Turn Off Automatic App Updates

It is likely that you never noticed apps updating themselves automatically in the background will slow down your device to some extent. But anyway that is a true fact. Updating apps automatically in the background is a process that occupies your device's CPU. So in order to boost your device performance, you can turn off this feature and update your apps manually via the App Store app. To disable automatic app updates, you need open Settings, tap [your name] and select iTunes & App Store to move on. Under the section of Automatic Downloads, tap the toggle switch next to the option of App Updates to turn off this feature.

turn off automatic app updates

Tip 7: Turn Off Automatic App Downloads

Like the tip of turning off automatic app updates, turning off automatic app downloads will improve the speed of your iPhone also. This process is also running in the background. You can try to turn off automatic app downloads to see if it helps to boost your device performance. On your iPhone, switch on Settings, tap [your name], and then click iTunes & App Store to keep on. Under Automatic Downloads, turn off Apps.

turn off automatic app downloads

Tip 8: Disable Background App Refresh

If you frequently open a lot of apps but don't close them in time, they might still be working in the background even if you're not using them. This process will slow down the running speed of your iPhone and many iPhone users will ignore this point. You can disable the feature of Background App Refresh in your device to fix this question. To disable Background App Refresh, launch Settings > General, choose Background App Refresh to go forward, and then tap the toggle switch to turn off it.

disable background app refresh

Alternatively, you can keep the feature of Background App Refresh enabled and turn it off targeted on one particular app individually from the list displayed below.

disable background app refresh individially

Tip 9: Disable the Location Services for Some Apps

As we all know, many apps request the location services. But if you turn on the location services for too many apps, there is one thing that you must make it clear is that these apps will continue to update and get your location information. It consumes the mobile phone memory very much. So you can turn off the location services for some of the apps so as to free up your device. To do this, you can go to Settings > Privacy > Location Services to adjust the settings for all of your apps that are using location services.

disable the location services for some apps

Tip 10: Reduce Motion Effects

Your device uses motion effects to create the perception of depth on your Home screen and within apps. On the one hand, these effects improve your using experience. On the other hand, these animations take up battery life and can contribute to a slow and sluggish iPhone. In that case, you can tap Settings > Accessibility, click the option of Motion to go ahead, and then turn on Reduce Motion.

reduce motion effects

Tip 11: Erase All Contents and Settings

If you want to speed up your device speed, you can erase all contents and settings on your device. If all the above tips are not working to you, you can try this method. However, before you execute this step, you must do a backup for all the important and valuable files and data on your device in advance, either to iCloud or to a computer using iTunes. Otherwise, you will lose everything on your iPhone after you have applied this method.

To erase all contents and settings on your device, you need go to Settings > General > Reset > Erase All Contents and Settings, enter your screen saver passcode to go on, and then tap Erase iPhone to confirm. Then you can recover your device from the latest backup.

erase all contents and settings

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