My pre-m1 iPadPro has been very slow loading pages in Safari since iPadOS 26. Seems a lot of people are having similar issues. Fixes mentioned range from clearing caches to a complete factory reset.
The solution for me was to go into Settings -> WiFi -> DNS and change the DNS from automatic to manual and configure with a decent DNS.
Unclear what changed to cause the problem (other than the great plague of ‘26) but things feel snappy again. YMMV
Related: what DNS are people using these days?
I can now say that updating my DNS setting was only a short lived fix for iPad/Safari sluggishness. It was better for a but now at random intervals it’s back to taking 10s of seconds if not longer to beginning a page load.
It feels like safari is sleeping for a bit then once it starts to load its fine. Once a single page experiences this delay others tend to load fine.
Very confusing. I’ve disabled all 3rd party plug-ins to no avail and I can’t reproduce the problem on my iPhone.
The immediate difference I can think of between iOS and iPadOS is windowing/stage manager. No clue why this would slow Safari page loads but I’m turning them both off for a bit to see if anything changes.
Oh the things one does to debug issues seemingly beyond their control…
Patrick McConnell