10 Ways to Improve Your Wi-Fi Without Buying Anything

 You can significantly improve your Wi-Fi experience with small adjustments to the placement of your Wi-Fi router and its settings.

Cruddy Wi-Fi performance is frustrating, but so is spending money when you could improve your Wi-Fi without spending a dime. Here are ten tips to improve your Wi-Fi for free, plus three bonus tips for people with more room in their budgets.

Table of Contents

Move Your Router to Another Room
Raise Your Router Up High
Move Wi-Fi Blocking Decor
Ditch the Wi-Fi for Ethernet
Enable Quality of Service Rules
Update Your Firmware
Adjust Your Wi-Fi Channels
Change Your Wi-Fi Band
Update Your DNS Servers
Put In an Upgrade Request with Your ISP
Not Free, But Try These Cheap Wi-Fi Boosting Solutions
Finally: Seriously Consider Upgrading

 

Move Your Router to Another Room

There’s a good chance the location of your Wi-Fi router is wherever your Internet Service Provider (ISP) put the drop in your house. The line came off the pole, to the nearest corner of your home, and that’s where the hardware went.

Moving your router is one of the easiest ways to fix Wi-Fi issues. This is because the signal from your router radiates out from the router in roughly a donut shape. If you have the router parked against the wall in the far corner of your house, around half that donut shape (or less, if it’s on a corner) is inside your home, and the rest is outside in your yard or neighbor’s apartment.

Just moving your router from an outside wall to a central location will do wonders for your Wi-Fi experience as the “umbrella” of the router is now over the most used spaces of your home. The more spread out your home (like if you live in a ranch with a utility drop at the far end of the house) the bigger the impact moving the router to a central location will have.

Raise Your Router Up High

On top of moving your router to a more central location in your home, you can also significantly improve your Wi-Fi experience by moving the router up high.

Putting aside the actual physical structure of the home, the bulk of the mass inside a home is between the floor and about 4-5 feet off the ground. That’s where the majority of our stuff—like couches, chairs, televisions, bookshelves, counters, appliances, etc.—is located.

If your Wi-Fi router is sitting on a shelf under your TV, a large portion of the Wi-Fi signal is being absorbed by all the stuff down at its level. Just putting the router on the tallest bookshelf in your living room or using the mounting holes on the back to mount it up near the ceiling will get it above most of the things that are interfering with the signal.

Routers aren’t exactly the most beautiful thing to look at, so if you want to conceal your router to make it stand out less you can do so. But if you cover your router to hide it, you should follow these router concealment guidelines to ensure that your camoflauge job doesn’t make your Wi-Fi signal worse than when you started.

Move Wi-Fi Blocking Decor

Whether you’re able to easily move your Wi-Fi router or not, also pay attention to all the things in your home that block Wi-Fi signals, including decor.

You might have assumed (correctly!) that your fridge or other large metal appliances would block your Wi-Fi signal. But you probably never considered that a large fish tank is incredibly good at blocking Wi-Fi or that the reason your signal is so bad on the opposite side of your open-concept living and dining room is beacuse your Wi-Fi router is parked behind your TV—and the giant metal RF shield in the back of your TV is messing with the signal.

Maybe you move the router, or maybe you move the large mirror or metal wall sculpture that is screwing with your Wi-Fi coverage. But either way, always be aware of what is between you and the router that might cause interference.