How to clear Safari cache and cookies on Mac

There are a handful of situations where clearing Safari’s cookies or cache — one of the places where Safari stores website data to avoid having to redownload it every time you visit a site — can help improve your browsing experience.

The first is when websites just stop working when you open them in Safari. For example, maybe Facebook stops updating with new posts, or the images on a site don’t appear as they should. If this happens, the cache is probably corrupted.

If you find that personal information automatically entered on sites is incorrect, deleting cookies may help. These are small files that sites use to store information about you and what you do on the site.

Even if none of these problems affect you, periodically cleaning your browser data can help protect your privacy from snoops looking to discover what you’ve been up to online. In this article, we therefore explain how to clear the cache and cookies of Safari on Mac.

We also have an article that explains how to clear the cache on a Mac.

How to Clear Safari Cookies and Cache for Websites

Clearing cookies and the cache data for individual sites can be done through Safari’s Settings/Preferences.

1. Open Safari
2. Click on Safari in the menu at the top of the screen.
3. Click Settings or Preferences (depending on the version of macOS you’re using).
4. Go to the Privacy tab.
5. Click Manage Website Data…
6. Choose Remove all or select individual websites to remove.

After the data loads, you will probably see a long list of websites. You can choose to remove everything or you can select only individual websites that you want to remove from this list. If you want to select a number of different sites, you can click on a site and then hold down the Command key to select a second, third, or fourth, and so on. We recommend that you don’t select hundreds this way – it’s better to delete in batches in case you need to start over.

If you prefer to select all and then deselect the ones you want to keep, you can do that. Use Command + A to select all, then hold Command while clicking a website you’d like to keep in this list. After that, just click Uninstall, not Done, because that will just undo all your hard work.

There is a search field that you can use to track down individual sites.

Be aware that deleting cookies may delete auto-filled usernames and passwords for sites, and will almost certainly log you out of that site if you’ve configured it to automatically log in each time you visit it.

How to Clear Safari Cache

The hidden Safari Developer menu can be used to clear only the cache, preserving cookies and browser history. This is a very useful diagnostic step you can take before removing these two items if a website is behaving badly.

If you just want to clear all your cache, you can do it by following these steps:

1. Open Safari.
2. Click on Safari in the menu bar at the top of the screen.
3. Click Settings/Preferences (depending on the version of macOS you are using).
4. Click the Advanced tab.
5. Check the box next to Show develop menu in menu bar.
6. Now a new Develop tab will appear in the menu at the top of your screen. Click this.
7. Click Empty caches.

Or click Option/Alt + Command + E.

Close all open Safari windows and select Clear Cache from the Develop menu. Then click File > New Window to launch Safari with a clean cache.

Remove Auto-Complete data from Auto-Complete

Safari’s AutoFill tool can fill in username and password information on websites, as well as credit card information and other elements such as your address and email information.

This can be very useful, but it can also be annoying if the data that is entered is incorrect or unrelated. It’s also a problem when AutoFill conveniently enters old or incorrect passwords or email addresses and addresses.

You can change or delete this information by following these steps:

1. Open Safari.
2. Click Safari.
3. Click Settings/Preferences.
4. Choose the AutoFill tab.
5. Here you can edit contact details, usernames and passwords, credit cards and other information. Click Edit next to the category you want to access.
6. You must enter your password or use Touch ID to gain access.

Remove incorrect data: If you notice that Safari automatically fills in incorrect information about you, such as your address, click Edit next to Use information from my contacts. This will open your Contacts app. Your card is at the top or under My Card. Here you can add and change information about you.

Remove incorrect passwords and site logins: For example, if you want to remove incorrect passwords, just click on the Passwords tab. If you know which password you want to remove, search for the website or service and locate the older password option (if there is more than one) and select it, then click the – under the column to remove it. You can then select Remove password. If that means no password has been saved for that website, you can recreate the entry for the site by clicking the Add button. You must first enter the URL of the site (i.e. something like https://facebook.com) and then type the username and password next to it (press the Tab key to move from field to field).

See: Autofill passwords, bank cards, names and addresses for more information.

Remove logins and passwords for the entire system

Pruning site logins can also be done via the Keychain Access app, which you’ll find in the Utilities folder of the Applications list in Finder, although you should be very careful using this app as it pretty much takes over the entire security operation. from your Mac ! However, removing erroneous username and password entries here will prevent virtually all of your Mac apps from using them, not just Safari.

Simply type the name of the site in the search field and search the list of results for Web Form Password entries. Right-click the item and select Delete.

Foundry

If you want to delete your Chrome or Firefox cache, cookies or browsing history, read: How to delete your Mac browsing history. For alternative web browsers, check out: Best Web Browser for Mac.