How to Clear Cache and Browsing History in Chrome

ChromeSafety & Privacy

By Corbin HartwickUpdated on June 25, 2018

Your cache and browsing history can sometimes be useful to your Chrome experience. Respectively, they help speed up the loading of web pages and remind you where you’ve been on the Internet. However, both of them can potentially be used to track what you do on the Internet by websites and other people. That’s why you may want to occasionally wipe them clean.

For more detailed information on what your cache and browsing history are, and why it’s a good idea to clear them out every once in a while, see our What is a Cache and Internet Browsing History and How to Clear a Cache and Internet Browsing History tutorials.

How to delete cache and browsing history in Chrome

1. Double-click your Chrome web browser icon in order to open it.

2. Click the menu icon in the top right corner, move your mouse cursor over More Tools, and click Clear Browsing Data.

(HINT: you can also hold down the “Control” and “Shift” keys, and then press the “Delete” key.)

3. In the new window that appears, you will notice that you have a choice of what types of browsing data you want to get rid of. Note that “Browsing History and “Cached Images and Files” are among the options. Click the check boxes beside each type of browsing data that you want to delete, or click them if they’re marked to tell Chrome that you don’t want to delete them.

Then, click the drop-down menu beside “Obliterate the Following Items From:” and select how old the data has to be for it to be deleted. You can choose between The Past Hour, The Past Day, The Past Week, The Last 4 Weeks, or The Beginning of Time (not really; this just deletes all files of the types you’ve chosen).When you’re ready to clear the chosen types of data, for the time frame that you’ve chosen, click Clear Browsing History.

There you go! You’ve cleared out your cache and browsing history for Chrome, and now you know how to do it again if you need to! Next, we’ll go over how to delete your cookies in Chrome, which follows a very similar process.