If your Android phone is getting short of storage space, check Chrome’s usage. It may be using gigabytes of storage that you can easily recover. Here is a quick guide to freeing up space.
The amount of storage in new phones continues to increase. At one time, phones had just 8 GB of storage for apps, photos, music and videos. Now the standard for even budget phones is 128 GB. Even though there is more storage than ever, it is still too easy to use it all up.
There are many ways to recover storage space on a phone, but I am not going to cover them all here. I will look at one specific method that recovered gigabytes of space on my phone and it took just a few seconds to do. You may be able to recover storage space too.
Although I look at Chrome, other browsers based on Chromium are similar. You will find the same features in Microsoft Edge, for example. The menus are different in different browsers, but the options are the same.
Related: Browse the web faster on your phone by preloading pages
Go to Chrome settings
Open Chrome on your Android phone and press the three dots in the top right corner to show the menu. Press Settings. On the next screen, look for Site settings and press it.
(Microsoft Edge has very different menus and Site settings is in Privacy and security.)
Website data that Chrome stores
When a website is visited, all web browsers save information to the phone, like cookies, scripts, images and other media, and so on. It can save having to download it again when a site is revisited.
Press Data stored on the Site settings screen and the next screen lists all the websites that you have visited. To the right of each one is the amount of storage that is used by each website sorted by size with the biggest at the top.
Take a look at my phone – the mewe.com website is using an astonishing 1.8 GB of phone storage! The site below it, argos.co.uk, is using 835 MB. Between them, these two websites are using 2.6 GB of phone storage, and I can’t even remember the last time I visited them, it is so long ago.
I don’t know why mewe.com is using so much storage. I suspect it is not because of visiting the website in Chrome (it didn’t work the last time I tried). At one time I had the MeWe app on my phone and I wonder if the data it stored is showing up here?
Whatever the cause, it is a lot of storage. Do you have websites that are using huge amounts of phone storage?
Clear website data
Press any item on the Data stored screen to open the Site settings screen for the website. Here is mewe.com, which is my biggest storage user. Your phone is probably different. You can either press the trash can to the right of the stored data figure or press the Clear & reset button.
All data created by the webstite is removed when you press Clear & reset. This includes cookies, cached content, login details configuration options and more. The next time you visit the website, you will be logged out and you will need to log in.
Don’t clear the data if you have forgotten your login username and password. If you use a password manager, it can be used to log you back into the site if necessary.
Return to the Data stored screen and down at the bottom is a Clear all data link. This does what it says, and you will be logged out of all sites. You can log back into them of course, but it is an irritation. However, it will recover the most storage space.
There is rarely any need to remove everything and clearing just the half dozen biggest storage users at the top of the list is usually sufficient to recover sufficient space to give the phone a bit of room to work in.
The next time you visit a site that was cleared, Chrome (or whatever browser you use), will begin caching content and storing cookies again. This means that storage is used up again. However, there may be sites you no longer access, and clearing the data will permanently recover storage.
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