As we’ve said, Steam does a lot more than just being a place to play your PC games, and sometimes that means it ends up slowing down your system. One of the most common culprits is the Steam Client WebHelper process, which sometimes consumes too much RAM or even takes up a lot of CPU time. Let’s see what you can do if this is your case.
Making Steam Client WebHelper a problem
Steam Client WebHelper is a Steam component that serves as a web browser. Although Steam is an application installed on the PC, it actually connects to the Steam servers and, for example, when you browse the store it shows you the application’s web page, nothing more, nothing less. Generally, this shouldn’t consume too much RAM or CPU resources, but sometimes it doesn’t.
The most direct method to eradicate the problem is to disconnect Steam from the Internet. With this you will logically lose a lot of its functionality, but if what you wanted was to simply play an offline game that you already had installed, then you won’t care much.
To do this, simply open Steam, click on the Steam menu and select “Go offline…”.
In most cases, after putting Steam in offline mode, the Steam Client WebHelper process should stop causing problems. Anyway, if this is not the case or you don’t want to take Steam offline, we will try the next solution, which is to disable the hardware acceleration.
To do this, click on the Steam menu then click on Settings. In the window that opens you have to select Interface on the left and there you will have to scroll down a little until you see the option “Enable GPU accelerated rendering when visiting pages Web”. You must uncheck the box and then restart Steam for the change to take effect.
If this does not solve the problems, we can also enable low performance mode in Steam. To do this you need to re-enter the application settings but in this case you need to go to Library on the left side. There you’ll find “Low Performance Mode”, which will disable some dynamic transitions but improve the overall performance of the Steam app.
Finally, the last thing you can try so that Steam Client WebHelper does not consume so much PC resources is to enable the “mini” library list. To do this, with Steam closed, you must press WIN + R or right-click on Start then in Run and write the following:
steam://open/minigameslist
This will open the Steam app in a minimalist mode that consumes fewer resources. If you want, you can create a shortcut on your desktop with this command to open Steam so you don’t have to open it using Windows’ Run option.
