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Your iPhone is for more than just texting and phone calls. From checking emails to navigating on the road, you use it constantly throughout the day. Having your iPhone battery die on you before you get home from work can be frustrating. While phone batteries do degrade over time, there is a better option than relying on low power mode to get you through the day. Your iPhone has a few key settings that are notorious for draining your battery in the background. The good news is, you can turn them off. Instead of watching your battery percentage plummet at the worst possible moment, you can make a few simple tweaks that will give you hours of extra life. Before you even think about buying a new phone, check your Battery Health menu (anything above 80% is decent) and then turn off these three power-hungry settings. It's the easiest way to make your iPhone battery last longer, starting right now. Don't miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source. Turn off widgets on your iPhone lock screen All the widgets on your lock screen force your apps to automatically run in the background, constantly fetching data to update the information the widgets display, like sports scores or the weather. Because these apps are constantly running in the background due to your widgets, that means they continuously drain power. If you want to help preserve some battery on iOS 18, the best thing to do is simply avoid widgets on your lock screen (and home screen). The easiest way to do this is to switch to another lock screen profile: Press your finger down on your existing lock screen and then swipe around to choose one that doesn't have any widgets. If you want to just remove the widgets from your existing lock screen, press down on your lock screen, hit Customize, choose the Lock Screen option, tap on the widget box and then hit the "—" button on each widget to remove them. Reduce the motion of your iPhone UI Your iPhone user interface has some fun, sleek animations. There's the fluid motion of opening and closing apps, and the burst of color that appears when you activate Siri with Apple Intelligence, just to name a couple. These visual tricks help bring the slab of metal and glass in your hand to life. Unfortunately, they can also reduce your phone's battery life. If you want subtler animations across iOS, you can enable the Reduce Motion setting. To do this, go to Settings > Accessibility > Motion and toggle on Reduce Motion. Switch off your iPhone's keyboard vibration Surprisingly, the keyboard on the iPhone has never had the ability to vibrate as you type, an addition called "haptic feedback" that was added to iPhones with iOS 16. Instead of just hearing click-clack sounds, haptic feedback gives each key a vibration, providing a more immersive experience as you type. According to Apple, the very same feature may also affect battery life. According to this Apple support page about the keyboard, haptic feedback "might affect the battery life of your iPhone." No specifics are given as to how much battery life the keyboard feature drains, but if you want to conserve battery, it's best to keep this feature disabled. Fortunately, it is not enabled by default. If you've enabled it yourself, go to Settings > Sounds & Haptics > Keyboard Feedback and toggle off Haptic to turn off haptic feedback for your keyboard.
