Mac Maintenance Tips You Should Start Using Today

Regardless of how much you are using your Mac, at some point you will run into performance issues. Those things happen no matter of the usage frequency. That’s why it’s imperative to focus on doing some maintenance as often as you can. Not only will that streamline the Mac’s performance, but it can help streamline your workflow. Here are some tips to consider.

Restart your Mac often

One of the things that we take for granted is that the Mac can run for hours and hours without a problem. It makes sense, because no one wants to go through the hassle of restarting their work. But restarting your Mac has some benefits. It clears the memory, it resets processes and it applies updates. Plus, it can solve some weird OS issues that you encountered. So yes, before you attempt any fix for anything, just try to restart first.

Update your macOS and apps

Simple, yet important, this tip can help you immensely. It helps patch up some important vulnerabilities, it can improve Mac performance and it does a lot of great things. Yes, it’s important to do this for apps and your OS too, and it’s totally worth it.

Manage your storage wisely

The real tip here is to watch out your storage space and remove stuff you don’t need. That can be anything from movies, games, TV shows, personal files and so on. Purge files here and there, and try to use a Mac cleanup tool when necessary. Use this comparison to make the right choice. The important thing is to keep an eye on the storage space, as that can be extremely important.

Remove items from startup

Why would you do that? The more apps start with your Mac, the more resources they eat up. And since the amount of resources is limited, you will have a slower startup and less performance. Hence the reason why you always want to keep that under control. It’s worth considering, as it will boost your performance if you limit the number of apps that start up with your device.

Keep the browser lean

Extensions are problematic because some of them might have malware, so you always want to use only those you need. And only install extensions after a thorough check for malware. Additionally, use only the tabs you need, because the more tabs you have in your browser, the worse the performance will be. So yes, you want to keep the amount of tabs you have in the browser under control. Clear the cache occasionally, especially if a site is misbehaving for  some reason.

Take care of the MacBook’s battery

It sounds like a no brainer, but a lot of people dismiss the battery life or don’t care about it. There are some simple methods you can use, like turning on Optimized Battery Charging or avoiding extreme heat. Don’t worry about leaving it plugged in, even if you do so, modern MacBooks know how to handle that process. Also, it’s recommended to use the Low Power Mode when you are stretching a charge, as it will help quite a bit. If the battery health for your Mac is rather low, replacing the battery is the better idea, so keep that in mind.

Do the minimal security-related tasks

What exactly would you need to do here? Turning on the FileVault is great if you want to encrypt your drive, as that means no one will be able to read your data unless they know how to decrypt it. As always, you don’t want to share your passwords with anyone, use a password manager. And while there, try to be careful with downloads and where you are getting stuff from. Enable the firewall too, as it can stop unwanted connections.

Use the First Aid tool at times

You can find Disk utility in the Applications/Utilities folder and here you will be able to check for and repair various errors. Even if this is not something you need to run daily or weekly, it does make sense to run it once a month or so, maybe once every two months. It’s a good step if you have apps crashing, files which don’t open or anything of that nature.

We always recommend taking your time when it comes to improving your Mac’s performance. That’s why using the right tools can be extremely useful. Yes, there are tons of different apps you can use out there, but at the end of the day what matters is to approach each of them with attention and focus. Take your time, assess the need for each tool, and then harness their benefits. If done right, you can get some really good results, but it still makes sense to perform these aforementioned maintenance tasks, just to be on the safe side.