Safari on macOS: Extremely slow website loading

Question

Safari on macOS: Extremely slow website loading

I’m experiencing a strange issue with Safari where it occasionally takes an extremely long time to loading a website, sometimes more than 20 seconds before anything happens. It’s almost as if Safari doesn’t realize I’m trying to access a webpage. This happens on a daily basis. When it hapends i start Chrome browser and type in the address and finish what i was about to do and Safari is still "connecting" to the site.

Quitting and reopening Safari fixes the problem temporarily, but it always comes back.

I’ve been dealing with this issue for nearly two years and would appreciate any ideas or troubleshooting suggestions.

What I’ve already tried:

The issue is not network related. Chrome works perfectly and loads all websites instantly.
Updating to macOS Tahoe 26 did not resolve the problem. The issue was present on previous macOS versions as well.
I’ve deleted all Safari history, cache, cookies, and website data.
Enabling or disabling iCloud Private Relay makes no difference.
I have completely wiped the harddrive to re-install a clean version of Tahoe 26 with no improvement.
I’ve tested both Google DNS and Cloudflare DNS in System Settings with no improvement, as it first thought it was a DNS issue.
The issue occurred on both an M1 Mac mini and an M3 MacBook Pro, suggesting it’s not hardware-specific.
I’ve never experienced this problem on my iPhone using Safari.

Has anyone seen similar behavior or found a solution?

MacBook Pro 14″

Posted on Jun 1, 2026 2:47 PM

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Answer 1

Camelot

Level 9

60,043 points

Jun 2, 2026 11:35 AM in response to Henrik Carlsson

The fact you can open Chrome while waiting for Safari means that it's not a freezing issue, which helps.

Fortunately, Safari has several tools that can help triage these kinds of things. They're semi-hidden, though.

Start by enabling Safari -> Settings -> Advanced -> Show features for web developers:

Now you'll get an additional 'Develop' menu and, more importantly, access to the Web Inspector.

Now, for any page, you can ctrl-click on the page and choose Inspect Element:

Now, as the page is loading, and for any activity in this window, Safari will show you more information that you ever cared to know about the page :)

Of particular interest in this case would be either the Network or Timelines tabs.

Network will show each element on the page (the base HTML, stylesheets, images, javascript, etc.) and show the exact time each piece of content took to load.

You can hover over any waterfall bar to see specifics:

Here, you can see that Safari waited 2.2 seconds for the server to start sending the data. This tab can be useful to highlight server-side delays (e.g. the server took a long time to respond), or slow network connectivity (content took a long time to download).

If that doesn't help, try the Timeline tab (the inspector needs to be open when the page is loading for the Timeline tab to fill out, so you may need to reload the page to see this).

Under timeline you can see where Safari is spending the most time:

On the above page you can see that most of the time was waiting for the content to load from the network, but you may also see delays in 'Layout and Rendering', meaning that Safari is having trouble working out the page layout (usually through bad design), or in JavaScript & Events, which is where the page is using JavaScript to manage some part of the content (e.g. dynamic content, animation, etc.).

Once you identify a likely culprit, you can start to drill down into causes and fixes (beware, though, this can be a rats nest trying to follow the page structure manually). Hopefully it will be enough though to at least narrow in on a solution.

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