Increase the speed of your old iPad

While certainly not expecting miracles – a slow iPad doesn’t suddenly become super fast – it is indeed possible to reap some speed gains. But making this difference in speed measurable is difficult. We’ve listed a number of tips. Settings may differ slightly depending on the iOS/iPadOS version.

An often mentioned tip is to close apps in the multitasking bar. This is bullshit. Applications are ‘frozen’ in the background, they do not consume system resources. It’s different when these apps download information in the background. If thirty apps are constantly requesting new information, you can imagine that this has implications for the speed of your iPad. you close with Settings / General / Background App Refresh. You can choose to disable the refresh completely or only for certain apps. We would do the latter because your favorite apps are still available for you the moment you open them. Of course it should remain user friendly.

Also consider turning off Location Services and Spotlight indexing which will make your iPad less active in the background. Not only is iPad faster to use, it also extends the life of your battery. Of course, if nothing is indexed the search will take longer and this will slow the “iPad piece” down.

Is your iPad full of apps, videos, and music? Then it might be worth some cleaning up. But this is only useful if, for example, you have less than 1GB of free space on your iPad. If you still have a few GB of free space, you don’t need to delete anything.

One measure that does not affect the overall speed of your iPad, but does affect the speed of Safari, is to clear the browser cache. Ironically, the cache is actually meant to make the web experience faster, but that only applies to sites you visit more often. A massive cache can actually slow down surfing. you do this inside Settings / Safari / Clear cookies and data. (or Clear history and website data)

That’s cool, all those apps that can send you notifications when there’s something to report, but for how many apps this is really necessary. And while this consumes quite a lot of system resources. you turn off notifications Settings / Notification Center. In iOS/ipados versions this title is Notification to be named. under the hood Contain or notification style You can now specify which apps you don’t need to receive notifications from.

Unfortunately, replacing a slow iPad will not only turn you into a fast animal, for that it’s better to upgrade to a newer model. But your iPad may indeed be a little faster. The previous tips are written from our own experience. Our iPad Air really feels faster when we do the operations mentioned above.

But can we prove this claim? We loaded our iPad Air to the brim with content and then ran the Geekbench benchmarking tool. After performing all the ‘speed-up actions’ in this article, Geekbench shows no significant difference. The iPad performs slightly better, but most results fall within the margin of error of such a comparison. Evidence? No it’s not that. But the above measures theoretically and provide a faster tablet for feeling. And this last one is the most important.

Are the tips above not helping your iPad? Then you can also consider resetting your tablet to factory settings. This may make the tablet faster, but this measure is somewhat finicky compared to the previous tips. Be sure to make a good backup before restoring your tablet. In this article, we will show you how to restore your iPad.

Did the tips in this article not give the desired effect and your iPad has not become noticeably faster? Then don’t throw away your tablet. In most cases, you can give your iPad a second life without being bothered by the slow device. For example, you can use an old tablet as a second screen or remote control, so in principle it is not so noticeable if your iPad is a little slower. You can also turn your tablet into an alarm clock or a photo frame in no time.

Have you finally decided that you need a new tablet? Then you should see which iPad best suits your usage and budget. In another article, we compare the four iPad types currently available in terms of features and price.