Do you have an old iPad that you no longer use because it has become very slow? Sin! You can make your iPad faster with the tips and tricks in this article.
Although you should absolutely not expect miracles - a slow iPad does not suddenly become super fast - it is indeed possible to achieve some speed gains. However, it is difficult to make this difference in speed measurable. We have listed a number of tips. The settings may be slightly different per 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 if thirty apps constantly request new information, this has repercussions on the speed of your iPad. You turn this off via Settings / General / Background App Refresh. You can choose whether to disable the refresh completely, or only for certain apps. We would do the latter, because the apps you often use are still available for you the moment you open them. It must of course remain user-friendly.
Storage capacity
Is your iPad packed with apps, videos, and music? Then it might be worth cleaning up a bit. However, this is only useful if, for example, you have less than 1 GB of free space on your iPad. If you still have a few GB free, it is not necessary to delete things.
Browser cache
A measure that does not affect the overall speed of your iPad, but does affect the speed of Safari, is clearing the browser cache. Ironically, cache is actually meant to make the web experience faster, but that only applies to the sites you visit more often. A crowded cache can actually slow down surfing. You do this in Settings / Safari / Clear cookies and data. (or Clear history and website data)
Notifications
Very nice, all those apps that can send you notifications when there is something to report, but for how many apps is that really necessary. And that while it consumes quite a lot of system resources. You turn off notifications Settings / Notification Center. In iOS/iPadOS versions, this heading may Notification to be named. Under the heading Including or Notification styleyou can indicate from which apps you no longer need to receive notifications.
How much does that really matter?
Unfortunately, changing a slow iPad doesn't just turn you into a speed animal, it's better to switch to a newer model for that. But your iPad can really get a little faster. The previous tips are written from our own experiences. Our iPad Air really does feel 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 benchmark tool Geekbench. After performing all the 'accelerate actions' from this article, Geekbench shows no significant differences. The iPad does perform slightly better, but most results fall within the margin of error of such a benchmark. So proof? No, not that. But the above measures do provide a faster tablet, both theoretically and emotionally. And that last one 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? Then don't throw your tablet away. In many cases you can give your iPad a second life, without being 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 no time at all.
