Why is Sketch slow?

Sketch is great at dealing with complex designs, but if you are experiencing performance issues, there are a few things that may be causing this and some steps you can take to fix them.

If none of the suggestions below help with the issues you’re having, please get in touch with us for more help. We’ll ask you for a few different things to help us investigate your issue and find a solution. You can find a full list of what we might need from you in the Providing Feedback article.

Note: If you’re experiencing issues with Sketch crashing, there are a few other solutions to try. You can find more details of these in the How can I stop Sketch crashing? article.

General troubleshooting

Check your Plugins

We do our best to check plugins and work directly with plugin developers to prevent issues. But sometimes they can cause issues. To work out if a plugin is at fault, follow our instructions in the How do I launch Sketch in Safe Mode? article.

If you do come across an issue caused by a plugin, check to see if there’s an update available for it, or get in touch with its developer for further support and assistance.

Try a complete reinstall

Sometimes a problem with your current installation of Sketch can cause issues, especially if it’s an update from a previous version. In this case, it’s worth trying a clean reinstall. To do this:

Quit Sketch and open Finder
Select Go › Go to Folder… (Cmd + Shift + G)
Enter the following path in the dialog that appears: ~/Library/Application Support/com.bohemiancoding.sketch3 and click Go
Copy the Plugins and Libraries folders to your Desktop
Download, install and launch AppCleaner (free)
Drag the Sketch Application icon from your /Applications folder onto the App Cleaner window
Click Remove to have AppCleaner remove all files (not Sketch Documents) related to Sketch
Download and Install the latest version of Sketch from https://www.sketch.com/updates
Make sure you move the latest version of Sketch to your Applications folder
Launch Sketch and enter your License Information or log in with your Sketch Account details

If you need to, you can now reinstall your Libraries and Plugins by dragging and dropping them onto the relevant pane within Sketch Preferences.

Document-specific troubleshooting

Reduce image sizes

Adding lots of images to a document may slow down navigation and increase its file size, especially if you have imported larger images and resized to smaller dimensions.

A handy workaround to this, is to use the reduce image size feature after you’ve added images, which will help to improve performance.

Watch out for Blurs and Shadows

Applying multiple blurs to layers may cause Sketch to slow down. This is because Sketch needs to render far more pixels than a non-blurred layer. The larger the blur radius, the many more pixels Sketch needs to try and process.

Shadows, both inner and outer, work in a similar way to blurs. Sketch will try to improve the performance of large shadows when zooming in, by only showing them when it is necessary.

Move Artboards to different Pages

Sketch can handle a large number of Artboards in a document, but when you start to add lots of them to a single page, then you may see a drop in performance, especially if they contain lots of large images, shadows, or blurs. A simple fix is to take advantage of Pages and move some Artboards to different Pages.

Look for text converted to outlines

One of the largest causes of slow performance is when a large amount of your document’s text has been converted to outlines. While this is useful for vectorizing various words and characters, it is not recommended to convert entire sentences and paragraphs to outlines.

Last modified on Nov 25, 2019