How to Hard Reset Your iPad [Quick Tips]

Sometimes your iPad may start to act funny, such as running slow or freezing up. If this ever happens to you, there’s an easy solution that usually takes care of the problem right away. That solution is simply to perform a hard reset on your iPad.

A hard reset your iPad is not the same as restoring it to a previous backup or resetting to factory settings. Some people often get the two confused. Resetting an iPad just means that your data and settings will be refreshed, which helps to reset buggy apps among other things. Basically, it’s like the restart function on your computer.

A hard reset is really easy to do as long as you know where the on/off button and the home button is. You can see where they’re located in the image below.

1. Now comes the hard part, hold down the on/off button and home button at the same time.

2. Keep holding; you need to hold both buttons down for about 10 seconds.

3. While holding, you may see the “slide to power off” screen show up; just ignore this.

4. You’ll know that your device has been successfully refreshed once the Apple logo displays on the start up screen; you can now release the buttons.

5. Wait for your iPad to start up; usually after a hard refresh, it can take 1-2 minutes.

That’s it. For the record, this also works on the iPhone and iPad Touch as well.