I’ve been using a Fire TV Stick 4K Max on the LG TV in my bedroom for a couple of years now, and I don’t regret the purchase at all. I’m not a fan of LG’s webOS platform in the slightest, so being able to just rely on the 4K Max for all my streaming needs has been a huge upgrade for my TV. It really has everything I could ever need on a bedroom TV, including all my favorite streaming apps and support for Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, and Wi-Fi 6E for a fast internet connection.

But while I’ve enjoyed my experience with my Fire TV Stick 4K Max, I have noticed over time that it has slowed down and isn’t as responsive as it was when I first got it. This didn’t surprise me much, because a Fire TV Stick really is just a tiny computer for your TV, and like most computers, it tends to slow down the more you use it and needs a bit of maintenance every so often to get it back up to speed.

Knowing this, I did a little investigating to figure out what was slowing down my Fire TV Stick. I did what a lot of people usually recommend, and cleared the cache, and while that helped, it didn’t fix my performance issues fully. That’s when I discovered the culprit was something clearing the cache alone could never fix: an overload of background processes draining its system resources.

The good news? There’s a simple fix that takes seconds and can clear out your Fire TV Stick’s background processes, helping it run as fast as possible again.

How to instantly speed up your Fire TV Stick

Closing the apps running in the background is key

Just like on your phone, when you switch to a different app on your Fire TV Stick, the app you were using doesn’t necessarily close. Instead, it can stay open in the background so that the next time you want to use it, it’s already open and ready to go. That’s great if you regularly switch between the same few apps, but it’s not so great when you end up with a bunch of apps running in the background that you’re not using. These apps can consume your Fire TV Stick’s processing power and RAM, which can slow things down.

Closing background apps you’re not using is an easy way to give your Fire TV Stick an instant performance boost, and there are two ways to do it.

The first is through your Fire TV Stick’s settings menu. Go to Settings > Applications > Manage Installed Applications, where you’ll see a list of all the apps installed on your device. From there, select an app and choose Force Stop to close it and stop it from running in the background (as you can see in the image above).

However, if you have a lot of apps installed, this process can get tedious pretty quickly. There’s another problem, too: the settings menu doesn’t show you which apps are actually running in the background, so you’re essentially left guessing.

That’s where the second method comes in handy. There’s an app on the Amazon Appstore called Background Apps and Process List that shows you which apps are currently running in the background and makes it much easier to close them. If you’ve ever used Task Manager on Windows or Activity Monitor on a Mac, it’s essentially the same idea for your Fire TV Stick. You can see what’s running in the background and deal with it from one place.

When I first opened the app, I immediately saw a list of all the apps running in the background, and I was shocked by how many were there. Some of them were apps I hadn’t used in forever. Take Fubo, for example. I hadn’t opened it in more than a month, yet it was still running in the background on my Fire TV Stick, using system resources for no reason.

With that in mind, the app has a Close All Apps button at the top. Selecting it starts a process that takes you to the Fire TV settings page for each app, where you can select Force Stop and close it. Once you do that, the app then automatically redirects you to the next app for you to Force Stop, and you can repeat the process until you’ve closed everything running in the background.

This is much faster than doing it manually because you don’t have to guess which apps are actually running. The app identifies them for you and takes you directly to the Force Stop option, rather than making you navigate the settings menu and hunt them down yourself.

The only caveat is that the Background Apps and Process List app is only available on Android-based Fire TV Sticks, such as the Fire TV Stick HD (2024), Fire TV Stick 4K Plus, and Fire TV Stick 4K Max. If you have a newer Fire TV Stick, such as the Fire TV Stick HD (2026) or Fire TV Stick 4K (2026), you won’t be able to use it because those models run Amazon’s Vega OS, which is Linux-based and doesn’t support Android apps.

Other ways to help speed up your Fire TV Stick

Clearing the cache and updating it can help

If you’ve closed all the apps running in the background and are after more ways to improve your Fire TV Stick’s performance, there are a few more things you can do.

Clearing the cache is one option, as it gets rid of all the temporary files apps have been storing on your device that could be slowing it down. You can do this by navigating to Settings > Applications > Clear All Application Caches.

Another option is to turn off autoplaying videos on the home screen, so your device doesn’t have to load them. You can do this by going to Settings > Preferences > Featured Content and turning off Allow Video Autoplay and Allow Audio Autoplay.

Finally, making sure your Fire TV Stick is running the latest software is another easy way to keep things running smoothly. Earlier this year, Amazon released a redesigned Fire TV experience with several performance improvements. After downloading the update, I immediately noticed that my Fire TV Stick 4K Max felt more responsive. So, if you haven’t updated your Fire TV Stick in a while, it’s definitely worth checking for an update, which you can do by going to Settings > My Fire TV > About > Check for updates.