I was playing around with an iPad recently and noticed a significant lag when waiting for YouTube videos to load. If you’ve been through a similar experience, you know how irritating it gets viewing start-stop, start-stop video streaming. :p

Below are a few different methods that could speed up the loading process. Try them one by one to see which solution works best for your situation:

1. Change Your DNS Settings (tips courtesy of iPad Video Converter)

   Step 1: Enter the settings menu on your iPad, select the General > Network > WiFi.Step 2: Then select the WiFi network that you use, tap on the blue arrow to the right.

   

   Step 3: You then need to type in your new DNS (208.67.222.222 ) settings into the space provided, if you have DNS setting you would like to keep a record of then you can simply press the Home/Power buttons at the same time to take a screenshot that will be saved in your Photo library.

   

2. Try turning off your Bluetooth in the Settings -> General -> Network category.
   
3. Try resetting your wireless router or modem.
4. Login to your YouTube account and adjust settings. This is the ultimate final desperation option.  Create a YouTube account if you don’t have one, log in, and adjust your settings to “I have a slow connection”.  The videos you watch will stream in a lower quality but will theoretically load faster.

If none of these solutions work, then it could be a problem with YouTube.  There has been discussion of YouTube throttling speeds in major traffic areas. There are people who line in NYC get buffering issues regularly. So it could be a regional problem.

If you are also experiencing slow speed on your iPhone, here is an article to help speed up your iPhone 3G or 3Gs.

***Tip ( June 2011): Get 25% OFF iPhone skins and cases at our partner site, Mama Studio, with coupon code: GEEKMAMA.

Have you noticed a lag in the speed at which your iPhone 3G or 3Gs loads SMS text messages or web browser pages?

Here’s the solution.

Remember that your iPhone is basically a small computer, it runs an operating system just like Windows XP or Mac OS X. And just like those systems, there are background tasks running that may slow down the performance of your iPhone. So in order to speed up your iPhone, you should properly quit the applications that you are not using.

Important note (common misconception):

When you press the ‘Home’ button on the front of the iPod Touch, you are not quitting the application. You are simply closing it, but the application is still open and running in the background.

Suppose you open a game that you downloaded or an application on your iPhone that constantly updates via the internet. But you don’t use that application often. Then it is smart to quit those applications so it is not hogging the bandwidth (speed) of your iPhone in the background.

So, in order to properly quit these applications on iPhone 3G or 3Gs, perform the following steps:

1. Open the application that you wish to quit by pressing its button on the home screen.
2. Once the app opens, hold the power button (on the top of the iPhone) until the ‘Slide to Power Off’ with a red button shows up.
3. Then let go of the power button and press and hold the ‘Home’ button on the front-bottom of the iPhone.
4. When the interface returns to the home screen, you have successfully quit the application.

Perform steps 1-4 on any applications that you don’t use often. This will speed up the performance of your iPhone.

Bonus: Clear the cache of your Safari browser regularly by doing the following:

Home Screen > Settings > Safari > Clear Cache.

This will help speed up the performance of Safari when surfing the web.

Double Bonus: Got an iPad? Learn how to speed up YouTube on iPad.