Unless your Mac is a bit old, you don’t need to do much to keep it fast and smooth.
Check these steps and you’ll put an end to the problem:
- First of all, RESTART. Many people overlook this, but you need to restart, and I recommend doing it between heavy tasks or every 3 or 4 days. It takes no time at all and eliminates half your problems.
- Try not to stuff your hard drive. I recommend having at least 10GB available so the system can move around freely. If you don’t know what else to delete, you probably need to start clearing out cached files.
- Limit your applications. I’m not saying you shouldn’t install apps, but make sure to keep track of the ones running in the background and at startup. You can view and manage these in “System Settings / Login Items & Extensions”. Remove items from startup by clicking “-” on an app, and turn off background apps you don’t need. Remember to uninstall apps you don’t use to save space and prevent them from running in the background and hogging resources; you can do this manually by dragging them to the trash, but to avoid leaving leftover files behind, I’ll talk about the best ones at the end of the article.
- Check your internet connection, because many of these apps need to make external connections to work. If you want, you can limit these connections using the Mac firewall.
- I’m practically going to ask you this as a personal favor: LIMIT YOUR BROWSER TABS. This consumes RAM unnecessarily, makes the browser run worse, and higher resource consumption = higher energy consumption = poorer performance. So try to get used to keeping a maximum of 10 tabs open; having more than that is usually unnecessary. If you want to save something for later, use bookmarks instead.
Look, I’m not going to sell you a magical solution, but following these steps prevents and solves most general performance issues.
In this article, I talk about two apps that help optimize your Mac.