7 Tips on How to Speed up iPhone for iOS 12

Updated Sep 27,2018 | by Cody

If you have an old iPhone or iPad, you find it running slow after update to a new OS like iOS 12. In this article, I will show you 5 ways to speed up iPhone for iOS 12. You old iPhone can have all the new features of iOS 12 and smooth performance at the same time.

Even an iPhone as old as iPhone 5s can update to iOS 12. If you try all these steps, the performance will dramatically increase. These methods also apply to even older iPhone. If you have a slow iPhone running iOS 8, 9,10,11, you can also read on to follow these steps. 

Your iPhone has a processor that handles the motion effects. When you move your iPhone around and you will see the background move and shift as well. The transparency effects may look fancy to some people but these take a little bit more processing power. For older iPhones, these effects can really slow things down.

Luckily, in iPhone Settings, you can reduce these effects. First, go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Reduce Motion. Then toggle that option on to reduce Motion effect.

Second, go back to Accessibility and then under Increase Contrast, you will see the Reduce Transparency option. Just flip it on to reduce Transparency. I have tested this on many old iPhones and it worked very well.

iOS has a feature to automatically update apps to the latest version, but that also slows your iPhone down because the process of updating apps in the background occupies your iPhone CPU and battery.

To turn off this feature, you can Go to Settings > iTunes & App Store and tap the toggle switch to turn off Updates in the Automatic Downloads section. Besides, you can also turn that off for music, apps, ebooks and audiobooks updates.

Besides auto-updating, App refresh will also slow your iPhone down. With this feature enabled, your apps will refresh their content in the background without your manually updating. It is helpful when you want to see the app content fast, but it consumes CPU cycles. 

To speed you old iPhone up, you can simply turn it off. To do that, you can go to Settings > General >Background App Refresh and then tap the toggle switch off. If you do not want to turn off App Refresh for all the installed apps, just leave the App Refresh on and turn the switch off for individual apps from the list below.

In order to load fast, may apps will save cached files on your iPhone, which may take lots of space. If you use Facebook app a lot, then you should clear Facebook cache on your iPhone because Facebook alone can take a few gigabytes of storage.

You should also clear Safari caches and history. In Settings, scroll down to Safari, and select Clear History and Website Data. And you should also clear app caches for other apps that you regularly use.

Luckily, you do not have to clear caches one app at a time, because you can use iPhone Manager IOTransfer to clear all app caches and other unwanted files in a few clicks. You can free download it to get started.

With your iPhone connected, open IOTransfer to scan your iPhone for junk files. When the scan is complete, it will show you how much space you can free up and you can click Clean My iPhone to clear all caches and unneeded files.

If you have many things saved on your iPhone, this can also slow your iPhone down. For example, if you have many photos, when you try to share photos on Instagram, it will load all your photos. That slows everything down.

You can either export some photos to your PC and delete them, or turn on the Optimize iPhone Storage by going to Settings > Photos. Other things like music, videos which you do not usually use, it is also recommended to save a copy on elsewhere and remove them from your iPhone.

As you know, there are a few apps out there that are hungry for your battery and for memory. Old iPhone has really low memory. In that case, it is quite necessary to clear your iPhone memory on a regular basis in order to speed up your iPhone.

Of course, restarting your iPhone can clear memory, but you do not have to. You can hold down the sleep/wake button until the power off switch comes up. Instead of tapping the power off button, hold down the home button until the power off button goes away. In this way, your iPhone RAM is cleared and you should see a huge performance increase.

Siri Suggestion is a great feature in iOS 12 by monitoring your actions and give you quick suggestions, so you can add this to Siri Shortcuts and do these actions by one Siri voice command.

While providing convenience, it also consumes your CPU. If you do not very much need this feature, you can disable Siri Suggestion to speed up iOS 12.

To do that, open Settings and scroll down to tap Siri & Search. Then scroll down to find Siri Suggestion. You can disable it for Suggestions in Search, Suggestions in Look Up, and Suggestions on Lock Screen. 

Related Readings for Reference