Danny Weber
09:24 03-12-2025
© A. Krivonosov
Is your iPhone lagging? Speed it up with iOS updates, restarts, Low Data Mode, reduced motion, Safari cleanup, freeing storage, battery checks, or a safe reset.
Sometimes an iPhone starts acting like it’s stuck in a Monday that never ends: apps open with a beat’s delay, Safari takes longer than it should to think, and animations turn oddly gentle and draggy. It’s easy to decide everything’s doomed and it’s time for a new phone. More often, the story is simple: clutter has piled up, free space has run low, background processes are doing their own thing, and the system hasn’t seen updates in a while. The good news: speeding up an iPhone is realistic, and usually it doesn’t take magic or a trip to a service center.
Start by checking iOS. That nagging sense of lag often shows up after a long break between updates: bug fixes and security patches tend to tame the odd stutter as a side effect. You’ll find it in ‘Settings’ → ‘General’ → ‘Software Update’. The current version at the time of writing is iOS 26, and small point releases like 26.0.1 or 26.1 almost always help. Major annual upgrades are trickier: they bring new features and visual changes tuned for newer hardware, can weigh more on older models, and take extra storage. A cautious update strategy makes sense here: keep up with the minor releases, and size up the big upgrade against your device’s age.
Many people still swipe away apps in the multitasking view, staging a cleanup with their thumbs. In practice, that’s long been considered pointless—and sometimes counterproductive—because iOS manages apps on its own. What actually clears the cobwebs is a full restart. On newer models, press volume up, then volume down, then hold the power button until the power slider appears. Turn the phone off, wait a few seconds, and power it back on. Quite often it wakes up fresher: memory gets cleared and stuck processes stop.
If you want to quiet background fuss, turning on Low Data Mode helps more than just with megabytes. It can boost speed and battery life by cutting down invisible tasks, pausing automatic downloads, and stopping mail from fetching itself. Enable it in ‘Settings’ → ‘Cellular’ → ‘Cellular Data Options’ and toggle Low Data Mode. You can do the same for Wi‑Fi: go to ‘Settings’ → ‘Wi‑Fi’, tap the ‘i’ next to your network, and turn on the data saver there.
Another lever is graphics. iPhone loves to look pretty, but polish can cost performance on older models. You can lighten the load by reducing motion: ‘Settings’ → ‘Accessibility’ → ‘Motion’ → ‘Reduce Motion’. That turns off parallax and some animations. In the same area, ‘Reduce Transparency’ under ‘Display & Text Size’ simplifies those frosted-glass layers. And if you’re on iOS 26 or later, take a look at the Liquid Glass effects: in ‘Display & Brightness’ you can switch them from Clear to Tinted to make the interface less demanding.
The built‑in browser can also accumulate sand in the gears: cookies, cache, and history sometimes become a quiet reason for slowdowns. Clear them in ‘Settings’ → ‘Apps’ → ‘Safari’ → ‘Clear History and Website Data’. If your goal is speed, removing the entire history works best. The trade‑off is expected: sites will forget preferences for a while, and the address bar won’t suggest recent pages until it relearns your habits.
The usual prime suspect for a sluggish iPhone is low free space. Phones tend to run better with at least about 10 GB free—or roughly 10% of total capacity. Check it in ‘Settings’ → ‘General’ → ‘iPhone Storage’. You’ll see what’s eating space and can act precisely. The quickest win is to delete or offload apps: ‘Offload’ keeps documents and data; ‘Delete’ removes everything. That’s handy if you use an app rarely but don’t want to lose its setup.
Next up: Messages. If you text a lot and swap photos, iMessage can balloon. You can move messages to iCloud by enabling sync in Apple ID settings → iCloud → Messages, though that often runs into paid storage. The alternative is to delete threads you don’t need—especially ones full of media. If you’d rather keep the conversation, there’s a careful approach: open a chat, tap the contact name, go into Photos, and bulk‑delete specific images. One more useful tweak: set voice messages to expire quickly—‘Settings’ → ‘Apps’ → ‘Messages’, then in the Audio Messages section set Expire to ‘After 2 Minutes’ so they don’t pile up for years.
Music and photos are two more space hogs. Even in the streaming era, many people keep downloaded tracks. You can trim them in ‘Settings’ → ‘Apps’ → ‘Music’ → ‘Downloaded Music’, removing entire playlists or specific artists. Photos are easiest to offload with iCloud Photos, but that’s also about paid storage. If you don’t want to pay, the old‑school way still works: connect iPhone to a Mac, import your shots into Photos, then delete them on the phone. Don’t forget the ‘Recently Deleted’ album—otherwise the freed space won’t reappear for 30 days. It also pays to sweep through screenshots and burst series; they often hide the quickest wins.
There’s another reason for surprise slowdowns that many people discover late: throttling due to the battery. In the past, Apple reduced performance on iPhones with aging batteries to prevent sudden shutdowns. In older iOS versions this showed up under ‘Battery’ → ‘Battery Health’, while in iOS 26 and later the mechanism changed and was renamed to Adaptive Power. You can disable it in ‘Settings’ → ‘Battery’ → ‘Power Mode’ to remove a possible system cap. Just keep in mind that speed can come at the cost of stability, so it’s sensible to check battery health and consider a replacement if needed.
If nothing above helps, there’s the heavy‑duty option: a full reset. It’s the closest thing to starting over—erase content and settings, return the phone to out‑of‑the‑box condition, then restore from a backup. Go to ‘Settings’ → ‘General’ → ‘Transfer or Reset iPhone’ → ‘Erase All Content and Settings’. Sometimes that brings the snap back; but if the slowdown lives in your data or apps, it may return with the restore. The strictest route is to set up the iPhone as new, without restoring.
And if you’ve tried it all, head to Apple—there’s always a chance it’s a hardware issue that diagnostics or a repair can fix. If the repair isn’t worth the price, there’s the honest finale: buy a new iPhone. Not the most romantic ending, but it’s the realistic one.