Delete Cookies and Cache in Safari

In this video, I’m going to show you how you can clear cookies in Safari on the Mac. This is a good troubleshooting tip if you’re having a problem with a specific website. Let’s see how we clear our cookies in Safari on the Mac. Let’s go to my Mac.

Now, when you visit a website, in a lot of cases, or I should say in most cases, what’s going to happen is that website will create a cookie and store that cookie on your Mac. This cookie will contain different information. In my case, when you log into the website, what it’s going to do is it’s going to create a cookie and keep track of that login information. So then, if you were to come back at a later date, it would know that you visited this site before, and it would prefill your username with your email address. This is how Safari knows when you’ve been to a site. It does this through cookies. When you add something to a shopping cart, let’s say you’re shopping on Amazon, the site keeps track of what you have in your shopping cart via cookies.

So cookies are a vital part of your browsing experience, but what they can do is cause problems. So then what you’ll want to do is delete the cookies from that specific website to see if that helps clear up the problems you’re having with the website. So how do we do that?

Well, all we need to do is just go to Safari’s preferences. So I go up under Safari in the menu bar, and then I go over to Preferences. From here, what we need to do is we need to go to Privacy. Under Privacy, you’re going to see an option where we can block all cookies. We do not want to do that. Cookies are a vital part of the browsing experience. As I mentioned, it keeps track of when you are logged into a website when you’re shopping; it keeps track of different things you may have in your shopping cart. So cookies aren’t inherently bad. They are needed for a good browsing experience.

But what you can do when you are having a problem with a cookie is remove a specific cookie. To do that, we go under Manage Website Data. We have a new window that opens up. And then from here, you just search for that website.

So let’s say I was having a problem with my site. I want to remove the cookie from my site. I type in here Dan’s for Dan’s Tutorials, and you’re going to see Dan’s Tutorials pops up. From here, what I’m able to do is remove any cache, cookies, and local storage. To do that, I just select it, and then I go to Remove. Once I remove it, I will have to log back into my site, and then Safari will create a new cookie for that.

So if you’re having a problem with a website, one of the best things to do is just remove the cookie for that website. In addition to removing the cookie, it also removes other data, such as the cache file. When you go back to that website, it’ll recreate that cookie as well as recreate the cache. To remove the data from Safari, all you do is just go to Safari’s preferences. From there, you’re going to see an option where you can manage your website data, click on that, search for the website you want to remove the cookies from, select it and then click on remove.

So that’s how you can remove cookies for a specific website in Safari on the Mac.