Memory on Mac
How to improve memory on Mac without upgrading the memory chips?
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On modern Mac's the memory is soldered to the system board and is not upgradable. On older Macs, depending on model / year the memory may be upgradable.
Memory is managed by macOS automatically. It compresses memory as needed, swaps to disk as needed, uses available free memory as a disk cache when it can. It will shrink the disk cache and give more memory to applications that need it automatically.
See this support document: Check if your Mac needs more RAM in Activity Monitor - Apple Support
Applications consume memory and some applications consume a lot of memory. While browsing the web with Safari / Chrome / etc. if you open many tabs you will consume a large amount of memory. Safari handles this a bit better than Chrome and other browsers but still you'll need to close some tabs now and then to free up memory if you are running low on memory and your memory pressure is yellow or red in Activity Monitor. You may not be able to run as many applications at the same time as well.
If your Desktop is cluttered with many files, create a folder on the Desktop and move all those files into that folder. Or otherwise re-organize and file them into Documents and folders. Files on the desktop are treated as Windows in macOS and it can consume considerable amounts of memory.
Some Safari / Chrome browser extensions consume a great deal of memory, try disabling or removing extensions in your browsers.
Use Activity Monitor to show how much RAM applications are consuming. You can then quit those Apps. Sometimes there are bugs in software that can cause an App to consume ever increasing amounts of RAM and to not release the memory properly. This is called a Memory Leak. To avoid this, make sure you keep your Apps up-to-date as developers release updates to fix problems such as memory leaks, etc. Reboot more frequently, as leaky memory won't be freed up until you reboot.
Check System Settings -> General -> Login Items. This is where software that starts up with macOS is defined. Reduce the number of things that load at startup and run in the background.
In Finder the default opening view is Recent Files. This can also consume considerable memory. Change the default view to your home folder instead. Finder -> Settings -> New Finder windows show: Select your username in the list.
If your Mac can be upgraded with more RAM then you should do that. You can find the RAM online. I highly recommend Crucial memory over most any other brand because Mac's are extremely picky about RAM being perfectly matched to the Apple memory specifications. Be sure to use Crucial's memory picker where you choose Apple and your specific Mac model and it will recommend only compatible RAM that is sure to work on your Mac.
If your Mac is struggling under high memory pressure constantly and you really do need more memory and the memory is not upgradable on your Mac then sadly, you need to consider buying a newer Mac with more memory capacity. While a new Mac may not be in your budget, used or refurbished Macs might be an option. In today's terms, 16GB is highly recommended for most everyone and 32GB+ for creatives or technical people such as engineers, etc. that push computers to their limits on a regular basis.
Avoid any Apps that claim to free memory as most all of them merely flush the disk cache from RAM and that can actually slow things down. The disk cache in RAM is responsible for keeping frequently accessed data in RAM where it is very fast to access versus re-reading the data directly from the disk.
