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Has your phone suddenly started working much slower than usual? One of the reasons might be that it’s stuffed with cache and cookies. They both can be used for good — to help apps and websites provide information faster and improve your user experience. However, if they take too much space, the opposite will happen — your device will lag. Read this post and learn how to clear the cache and cookies on your iPhone.
Contents:
What is cache, and what does it do?
Cache data is simply images and files collected and stored by apps and websites on your phone. It’s used to improve your user experience: with cache data, apps, and websites don’t need to go back and forth to request the same information. So, in theory, it should speed up the process. However, that’s not always the case. Some apps and websites might store so much cache information on your phone that it does the opposite — slows down your device. Therefore, it’s good to do a cache spring clean now and again to make some space on your iPhone.
How to clear the cache on an iPhone and iPad
The following steps will clear all cache collected by websites and stored on your device. Note that if your device is running iOS 11 or later and you delete your Safari browsing history, the changes will sync across all other devices connected to your iCloud — they’ll lose the logs.
Go to Settings and scroll down to Safari.
Scroll down to Privacy & Security. Click on a blue Clear History and Website Data button.
Tap Clear History and Data in the pop up to confirm your decision.
How to clear the app cache on an iPhone
Deleting the cache for apps is a little bit more tricky as it will vary from app to app, and some apps might not give you an option to delete the cache without deleting the app. But let’s take Slack as an example, as deleting the cache for other apps (that allow you to do so) will be somewhat similar.
Go to Settings and scroll down to Slack (or any other app), click on it.
Under Troubleshooting, you should see Reset cache on next launch, slide the button to the right. This should delete all cache next time you open the app.
If you don’t see the option under the chosen app, you can try an alternative - checking your iPhone’s storage and tweaking the settings there. Follow these steps:
Go to Settings and tap General.
Select iPhone Storage. Here you’ll see all the apps stored on your device in the order of how much storage space they take up.
Find the app you are concerned about and click on it. Here you can either offload the app or completely delete it. The difference is that by offloading the app you free up storage space on your device; however, if you ever want to use it again, you can reinstall it. It will reinstate any documents and data saved by the app. It works particularly well if you have purchased an app but don’t want to say goodbye forever.
Select Offload App. If you want to reinstate it, go to the App store > Click on your profile photo in the top right corner > Purchased > My Purchases > Not on this iPhone > Find the app you want to reinstall.
How to clear cookies on an iPhone
Cookies are another tracking option that websites use to understand your browsing habits. They are similar to cache as they can improve your browsing experience. For example, you might visit an online shop, add something to your basket, get distracted, and visit another page. Next time you visit the same online shop, the items will still be in your bag. That’s a cookie job. However, they can also invade your privacy and slow down your device performance.
You can delete cookies by deleting your browsing data:
Go to Settings and scroll down to Safari.
Scroll down to Privacy & Security. Click on a blue Clear History and Website Data button.
Tap Clear History and Data in the pop up to confirm your decision.