15 Ways To Speed Up Safari

Safari should be fast as loading and displaying web pages on your Mac. If it is slow, here are 15 things you can try to fix the problem.
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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you what to do if Safari is running slow on your Mac.
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So first let me start off by saying that Safari should load and display webpages very fast on your Mac. It's a very fast browser and if that's not happening then something is wrong. So here's a whole list of different things that you could try if Safari is working slowly for you. If you find one of these is the problem let us all know in the comments below so we know which ones work more often than others. Now before we start digging into Settings and Files one of the most common things I see when people say that their browser is working slowly is that they have tons of Tabs open. Like this. Safari should be able to handle lots of tabs. But if Safari is slow and you have lots of tabs open the first thing I would do is to close some of them. There's really no reason to have lots of tabs open. Chances are you're not using all these webpages at once. It's easy to go back to a webpage. There are a lot of alternatives. For instance under View turn on Show Favorites Bar. This will show you all of these bookmarked links. Anything in your Favorites folder will be here. So it's easy to go back to a page. So for instance here I've got the Apple Homepage open. But when I'm done looking at it I can just Close it. If I want to go to it again all I need to do is simply click on the Bookmark there and it will open up. So instead of having all these tabs open try just using three or four at a time. Only the pages that you're actually looking at right now and switching back and forth between. Otherwise Close the webpage knowing that you can go back to it really easily.
So one of the first things I would do if Safari is running slow was I would try to clear all the website data. Now website data shouldn't slow down Safari but if the website is misconfigured or misbehaving then perhaps it could cause some issues. So let's go to Safari, Preferences. From there go to Privacy. Under Privacy look for the button Manage Website Data. Go there and after a minute it will load all the website data  your browser is currently saving. You can simply click the Remove All button. This may log you out of some websites. It may clear out Preferences you have set for other websites. But in general you won't notice too much of a difference. So Remove All and clear all that out. 
Now the next thing you may want to clear out is your History. Your history shouldn't slow down Safari either. But it's worth a try. Go to History and at the very bottom you've got Clear History. You could also go to Safari, Clear History. Then you could choose to clear out only the last hour, Today, Today and Yesterday, or All History. Go to All History and Clear History and see if that helps.
Now something far more likely to be causing trouble is Extensions. Go to Safari, Preferences and then click on Extensions. You'll see a list of what extensions you've got installed. If Safari is running slowly and you've got a lot of extensions here then it's actually pretty likely this may be your problem. You can simply uncheck these to disable the extensions and then for good measure Restart Safari. If there are things here you really don't need you can always select them and click Uninstall. Try to be very careful with extensions. Only have ones that you really know what they are, what they do, and you know you need them. When trying to troubleshoot turn them all off even if you know what they do and you want them just to see if they are the ones causing trouble. After all you may want an extension but if it's causing Safari to run slowly then maybe you need to find an alternative or go to the developer's site and find out if there's a new version or a fix for causing Safari to run slowly.
Another thing to look for in Safari Preferences is under Search. When you do a Search by typing up here you're going to get a lot of different things. Like for instance Goggle Suggestions, Bookmarks, and things like that. You can turn a lot of these things off speeding up the use of the Search field up here. So turn off Include Search engine Suggestions, turn off Preload top hit. Make sure Include Safari Suggestions is turned off. Even turn off Show Favorites if you want. So with all that turned off this is going to give you simpler results but it's going to be using a lot less resources to generate those results. 
Also note that when you create a new Tab or window in Safari you may be loading something automatically in it. You go to General in here you could have New Windows or Tabs open with the Start Page, Home Page, Empty Page, or Same Page. The Home Page is going to load whatever you've got set right here as your Home Page. But if you're opening up a new tab or window, so you can then go somewhere else, you're actually loading two webpages then. Your Home Page and then the page you actually want to go to. So you can cut the number of webpage loads in half by switching this to empty. Same thing if you have it set to Same Page. If you have it set to Start Page, well the start page loads previews for your recently visited sites. So it's going to be loading a lot of things. One thing that can speed up Safari a lot is to just have Empty Page set for both of those. So now when you open a new tab it's just empty. It hasn't taken up any resources to load anything. Now you can type what you want or go to a bookmark.
Now you may want to try emptying your browser cache. Cache actually speeds up  using Safari. So working properly it should actually make things faster. So don't expect clearing it out to actually speed things up. But if something is corrupted or maybe a website is misconfigured then it might be worth trying to do that. You have to go to Safari, Preferences, Advanced. Then check Show Developed Menu in Menu Bar. Now you've got a new menu up here. Go to that menu and then select Empty Caches. Then maybe restart Safari for good measure and see if things are working a little faster. Now if they are working faster then it may not be that clearing the cache actually was what was helping. What was helping might be that your hard drive might be almost full. Go to the Apple Menu, About This Mac, and then to Storage you can check how much space you're using. As a good rule you should have between 10 and 20 percent of your space available. If it's fuller than 90% then you may find that Safari, and lots of other things, are running slowly as well. So it might be time to do some Spring cleaning. To Archive some projects you're done with. To Delete some apps that you're not using anymore. Things like that. Try to get between 10 and 20 percent available space on your drive to make performance better in general. 
Now there are other settings in Safari that are specific to websites. If you go to Safari, Preferences, and then you go to Websites then you're going to find a bunch of different settings on here on the left. For instance, Auto Play. You may have various different settings here for Auto Play. Then you've got your Default here. If Safari is slow you may want to set your Default to Never Auto Play. So when you go to a page that has a video on it it's automatically stopped and you actually have to press Play to begin. Then maybe review these other sites and set some of them to Never Auto Play as well. 
Now if you have any browser plug-ins installed you should find an item here at the very bottom of this list for Plug-Ins. You can set the Default to have those disabled. Plug-ins aren't really used much anymore and with December 31, 2020 being the end of the line for Flash most people won't have any plug-ins installed. But if you've got some you may want to consider disabling them and seeing if that's the issue. You can also check for plug-ins by going to your Library folder. So in the Finder choose Go and hold the Option key down to reveal Library. Then look for Internet Plug-ins right here. It should be empty. But if there is something in there it might not necessarily be bad. Apple's got this page here which lists a few plug-ins that should be okay and a couple other folders that you may want to look in to check for plug-ins.
Now another things that could be slowing down Safari has nothing to do with Safari or your Mac at all. It may be your network equipment. Your cable or DSL modem or whatever you've got from your internet provider. When was the last time you tried restarting it. You may want to try turning it Off, waiting a minute, and turning it On again. Also, how old is it. If you don't own your own equipment but it's provided to you, if it's more than a few years old you may want to call them and find out if there's an updated piece of equipment. They won't automatically call you and offer it to you. But you could be due getting an upgrade on your equipment and that could significantly  speed things up. A lot of the equipment also gets updates just like your Mac gets updates. But it may not be updating properly. So you may want to go and contact support or look at the documentation you have to see how you check for updates for your internet router. 
Now another thing to consider is that this may be a Domain Name Server issue. DNS. So you can look up your DNS settings by going to System Preferences and then Network. Then you want to look for how you're connected. In this case I have both ethernet and Wi-Fi but most people are just going to have Wi-Fi. So select that and then click Advanced. Then look for DNS. Now typical settings will show a number like this, yours is going to be different, in gray. This means it's using your internet service provider's DNS. Every time you go to a website, like say Apple.com, it's going to take Apple.com and use DNS to find out what are the actual numbers, the real address, of Apple.com. If the DNS server is slow it could slow down loading webpages. It's not just the domain name of the page you're at that it needs to look up. There's all sorts of content on the pages that may be from different websites and servers. So there might be dozens of DNS look ups every time you load a webpage up. If your DNS server is slow it can definitely make your browser slow. So one option is to click the Plus button and actually add your own DNS. Now here are some free ones that you may want to checkout. Goggle has a DNS service when you can use these two DNS servers. Open DNS.com has some addresses you can use as well. There are lots of others. Like, for instance, Quad9.net. At the very least use these as a test. Try Goggle's and see if switching DNS will actually make Safari faster. If it doesn't make any difference then the problem probably wasn't DNS. If it does make a difference then you can go and shop around for the best free DNS service.
Now another thing that may be happening is it may just be one or two websites that are actually slow on Safari. You can figure out which one of those are by going to Activity Monitor. So look for the Activity Monitor app and launch it. Now you may think that well Activity Monitor is for figuring out what app is slow. I know Safari is slow so what good is that going to do. Well, Activity Monitor will actually break things down by website. So do a Search for http and then you'll see a list of all the websites you currently have open in Safari and websites you recently had opened as well. You could see how much CPU each one is using. In this case they are all resting nice and quietly using 0% CPU. So all is well. But if you see one website up here using a lot of CPU, even though you're not doing anything with the site, you know that there's a problem with that site, maybe try to find an alternative. 
Another thing you may want to consider is maybe you're not getting the full speed from your internet provider that you think you are. So do a speed test. Go to a site like Speed Test.net and run the speed test to see what sort of service you're getting from them. If it's underperforming then you may want to call them. The problem may not be Safari at all but your internet provider.
Now if all that fails there is kind of an extreme action that you can take. That's to completely reset Safari by deleting a bunch of stuff out of your Library folder. So first Quit Safari. Maybe for good measure Quit all the apps that you've got running. Now use the Go menu in the Finder with the Option key held down to go to Library. Now where Safari saves its preferences and other things depends on which version of macOS you're using. So I'm using Big Sur here. There is an entire folder called Safari and you could put that in the Trash. Then go into Preferences and look for anything in here that has Safari. So I can just do a quick search here and look for Safari in Preferences. So I can see some things here and put those in the Trash. Then also look in Containers and under there do a search for Safari and get rid of all that. Then Relaunch Safari and it should start off like it's the first time you've run it. However, you may find a lot of things, like Bookmarks, come back simply because you have those synced with iCloud. 
So if Safari has been slow for you hopefully one of those things work to speed things up again.
Comments: 5 Responses to “15 Ways To Speed Up Safari”

Shirley
4 years ago
I second turn off tabs. I once had a friend who complained that Safari wouldn’t work. When I looked at his computer, he had 320 tabs open.
brad
I've been called "basic brad" before. Sorry if I missed it but, if Safari's slow, I try another browser.
Michael
How can I tell if it Safari that is slow or the server?
Gary Rosenzweig
Michael: Depends on a number of factors. But try these things to see if any work. If they do, that gives you a clue.
Jonathan Sieswerda
Cloudflare DNS 1.1.1.1 is also a very good fast free option that has made a difference in loading speeds for a lot of people
Comments Closed.
15 Ways To Speed Up Safari

Comments: 5 Responses to “15 Ways To Speed Up Safari”

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