Speed Up My Mac: The Complete 2026 Performance Guide

To speed up a Mac, find out what is holding it back before changing anything. In most cases it is one of four things: a single app using most of the processor, memory that is full, a startup disk that is nearly full, or too many apps starting at login. Each one can be checked in a few minutes with tools that come with macOS, and the steps below go through them in order.

1. Find the app that is using the processor

1. Open Activity Monitor from Applications > Utilities, or search for it with Spotlight.
2. Click the CPU tab, then click the % CPU column header so the busiest process is at the top.
3. Watch the list for a minute. A process that stays at the top with a high figure while you are not using it is worth a closer look.
4. If it is an app you know, quit it normally first. If it will not quit, select it in Activity Monitor, click the stop button in the toolbar and choose Quit or Force Quit.

Leave processes you do not recognise alone until you have looked them up. Many of them belong to macOS. Spotlight indexing and Photos analysis, for example, are busy for a while after an update or a large import and then settle down by themselves.

2. Check memory pressure

In Activity Monitor, click the Memory tab and look at the Memory Pressure graph at the bottom. Green means the Mac has the memory it needs. Yellow or red means it is short and is leaning on the startup disk as swap, which is slower than real memory.

• Sort by the Memory column to see which apps hold the most.
• Quit apps you are not using. Closing a window is not the same as quitting: use Cmd + Q.
• Close browser tabs you no longer need, and remove browser extensions you do not use.

3. Make room on the startup disk

macOS needs free space for swap, updates and temporary files, so a disk that is almost full can make everything feel sluggish. Open System Settings > General > Storage to see how much is free and which categories are the largest. Empty the Trash, clear out the Downloads folder and remove apps you no longer use. Our guide on how to free up Mac storage covers this in more detail.

4. Trim what starts at login

1. Open System Settings > General > Login Items (named Login Items & Extensions on newer versions of macOS).
2. Under Open at Login, select anything you do not need straight after starting up and click the minus button.
3. Under Allow in the Background, switch off helpers for apps you rarely use.

Removing an item here does not uninstall the app. It only stops it from starting by itself.

5. Restart and update

A restart closes every process and clears temporary files, which is often enough after weeks of sleep and wake. Then open System Settings > General > Software Update and install what is waiting, and update your apps as well. On an older Mac you can also reduce the visual effects in System Settings > Accessibility > Display with Reduce motion and Reduce transparency.

What MacPrune does here

MacPrune is a disk cleaner, and we make no claim that it will make your Mac faster. It helps with two of the checks above. Its Monitor page shows live CPU, GPU, memory, disk, network and battery use, lists the apps using the most CPU and memory, and lets you quit them from there. Its Clean page scans the disk and sorts what it finds into three groups: Safe to clean, Review before cleaning and Handle with care. Whatever you choose moves to the Trash after a confirmation, and the space is freed when the Trash is emptied. The basic version is free and Pro is a one-time purchase.

If the disk turns out to be the problem, you can download MacPrune and see what is taking the space. For more on this topic, read why your Mac is slow and what to do when a Mac overheats.