How to Clear the Cookies on your iPad to Help it Run More Efficiently

As a freelancer, speed is important. You don’t have time to hang around waiting for websites on your iPad to load or apps to open. If your iPad is acting sluggish and Safari won’t load websites, it may be time for a major spring cleaning. Here’s how to clear the cookies on your iPad to help it run more efficiently. It’s an easy procedure, and you won’t even need to take your iPad out of its iPad Air 10.9 case (or iPad Pro case, if that’s what you’ve got).

 How to Clear Your iPad Cookies:

 To delete the cookies on Safari on your iPad, follow this five step procedure:

1. Go to your iPad Settings. You’ll find it among your apps, and can recognize it by the grey gear icon— or the simple word ‘Settings’.
2. Scroll down in the left-hand column till you find ‘Safari’. Click on that, and a bunch of Safari-related settings will pop up in the right pane. 
3. In that right tab, choose ‘Advanced’
4. Now choose ‘Website Data’. You’ll see an enormous list of all the websites which have data stored on your iPad, just in case you want to go one by one and delete some website data while leaving data from other sites untouched. 
5. Click ‘Remove all Website Data’, which you should see just under that list.

Be aware that deleting your cookies in this way will log you out of any websites you were logged into.  When you log in again, the website will place a brand new cookie on your device.

If you’d like to delete both history and website data in one fell swoop, you’ll want to follow this slightly simpler procedure.

1. Go to iPad Settings (again, this is the grey gear icon among your apps)
2. Scroll down in the left hand column till you find Safari, and click that.
3. Choose ‘Clear History and Website Data’, and then confirm your choice in pop-up confirmation window. 

Blocking Cookies in Safari

After clearing out all your website data, you might just decide you want to keep a clean slate. What benefit is there, anyway, in hosting all this information for other companies?

It’s true that many cookies are simply advertising bots, collecting info on you so that the ads you see can be more carefully targeted. That’s not the sum total of all cookies on your device, though. After you’ve logged into a website, you also get an authentication cookie— and it’s that cookie which enables the website to show you your own  personalized account information. Without cookies, you won’t be able to login to mobile banking on safari, nor check your email account. 

That said, if you don’t use Safari for personalized browsing of this nature, you might enjoy the extra security and light-weight browsing you get when blocking all cookies. To do this: 

1. Open Settings (your grey-geared friend)
2. Scroll down in the left hand column and click Safari
3. Next to “Block All Cookies” draw the slider to the right
4. Confirm your decision in the next pop up. 

If after giving it a try you decide browsing the web just isn’t as rewarding if you don’t have cookies, you can visit that same setting and pull the slide bar the other way to allow websites to save cookies again. 

Deleting Cookies in Other Browsers

While Safari is Apple’s native browser and the most likely culprit for extensive cookie-gathering, you’re going to have a separate collection of cookies for every single browser you used. There’s no universal way to delete all cookies for every browser—- you have to go in and do them one by one. Here’s the method for a few common browsers.

For Chrome:

1. Open your Chrome app
2. Click on the three dots that you see in the upper right of the app
3. Click on “Settings”
4. Choose “Privacy”
5. At the bottom of the pop up ‘Privacy’ window, click ‘Clear Browsing Data’.

You’ll be able to choose just what you want to clear, and once you’ve done that a dialogue window will ask you to confirm your choice. 

For Opera:

1. Open your Opera Touch app
2. Tap on the Opera logo— you’ll see it at the bottom menu.
3. Click “Settings”
4. Choose “Clear Browser Data”
5. Select “Cookies and Site Data” and then click clear.
6. In this same Settings area you’ll also have the option to clear out cached images and files. 

For Firefox:

1. Open your Firefox app
2. Click the triple-line option you’ll see near the bottom of your screen
3. Click the big blue “Go to Settings” button
4. Click on ‘Data management’
5. Your list of saved data incudes browsing history, cache, cookies, offline website data, tracking protection, and downloaded files. Select “Cookies” and anything else you’d like to clear
6. Click “Clear Private Data” at the bottom of the list

Any other iPad browser will use an analogous method to get rid of cookies and other stored data. Open the app, then visit settings. Once you’ve done that, you want to scan the list for something that sounds promising. Usually, it’s called “Clear browser data”. In the case of Firefox, though, we saw that they changed that up and called the setting “Data Management” so be aware of slight changes in wording that still all mean the same thing. 

Related Reading: How to Download iOS 15.6 on My iPad?

Some browsers have more nuanced controls, and allow you to decide on a site-by-site basis which websites you want to save cookies for.

Now that you’ve got all the cookie data deleted from your iPad, give that sluggish website a try again. Does it load faster? If it does, happy browsing! You’ve cleared away a lot of junk and everything should be working better now. 

If your iPad browser is still being slow, it may be time for some deeper troubleshooting. But before you bring your iPad into the repair shop, check your internet speeds! You don’t want to be blaming your tablet for something that was your internet provider’s fault all along.