How to Make Your Internet Faster

Before blaming your provider, most slow-internet problems are inside your home — usually Wi-Fi, the router, or too many devices. Here are 12 fixes that actually make a difference, roughly easiest first.

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Quick wins

1. Restart your router. The classic fix — clears congestion and re-syncs the line. Unplug for 30 seconds.
2. Move closer to the router. Wi-Fi weakens fast through walls and distance. Test in the same room first.
3. Reposition the router. Central, elevated, out in the open — not in a cabinet, behind the TV, or on the floor.
4. Disconnect idle devices. Phones, TVs and smart gadgets all sip bandwidth in the background.

Wi-Fi improvements

5. Use the 5 GHz band. It's faster than 2.4 GHz at close range. Use 2.4 GHz only for distance/through walls.
6. Change the Wi-Fi channel. In a crowded building, neighbours' networks cause interference. Switching channels in your router settings can help.
7. Update router firmware. Manufacturers ship speed and stability fixes.
8. Add a mesh system or extender. For big homes, one router can't cover everything — mesh fixes dead zones.

Bigger fixes

9. Use a wired (Ethernet) connection. For desktops, consoles and TVs, a cable is faster and more stable than Wi-Fi.
10. Replace an old router. Hardware older than ~5 years can cap your speed well below your plan.
11. Change your DNS. Switching to a fast public DNS (e.g. 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8) won't raise raw speed but can make sites feel snappier.
12. Upgrade your plan — or switch providers. If wired speed is already near your plan's max, the only way up is a faster plan or fiber.

Re-test after each change →See what actually helped

Test before and after

The only way to know if a change helped is to measure it. Run a speed test before and after each fix — test wired and close to the router to see your true line speed. If the wired result is still far below your plan, the bottleneck is your line, not your home, and it's time to check the details and call your provider.

Ordered by what actually helps

Most lists of speed tips treat every suggestion as equally weighted. They aren't. In rough order of how often each one genuinely solves the problem:

• 1. Move the router, or move closer to it. By a wide margin the most common cause of “slow internet” that isn't slow internet at all. See router placement.
• 2. Use the 5 GHz band. Many devices cling to 2.4 GHz because it reaches further, and it's far slower and far more congested.
• 3. Plug in with a cable for anything stationary — desktop, console, TV.
• 4. Restart the router, properly: unplug for 30 seconds, not a quick power cycle.
• 5. Check what's using the line — a console updating in the background is the usual culprit.
• 6. Replace a router older than about five years. Pre-Wi-Fi 5 hardware cannot deliver a modern plan no matter what you pay for.

The bands, briefly

Band	Trade-off
2.4 GHz	Far reach, slow, crowded
5 GHz	Fast, one or two rooms
6 GHz (Wi-Fi 6E/7)	Fastest, same room

If your router publishes one network name for all bands, devices choose for themselves and often choose badly — a phone can stay latched to 2.4 GHz while sitting next to the router. Splitting the names so you can pick manually is unglamorous and frequently doubles the measured speed on the devices you care about.

Things that are widely recommended and don't work

Worth saying plainly, because these absorb a lot of people's evenings:

• Changing DNS. A faster DNS resolver can shave a few milliseconds off the first lookup for a domain. It has no effect on your bandwidth whatsoever. Worth doing for privacy; not a speed fix.
• “Internet booster” and “Wi-Fi optimiser” apps. There is no software on your device that can increase the capacity of the line coming into your building.
• Registry and TCP tweaks. Modern operating systems auto-tune these. The guides that recommend them are usually a decade or more out of date.
• Cheap Wi-Fi extenders. Most halve throughput, because they receive and retransmit on the same radio. A mesh system or a powerline adapter is a real fix; a £20 repeater usually trades speed for coverage without telling you.

Measure the change, don't guess at it

Every fix above should be verified rather than assumed. Test from the same spot, on the same device, before and after — and run each test three times, because a single reading moves around enough to make a change look effective when it wasn't.

If nothing you do indoors moves the number, test wired next to the router. If the wired result matches your plan, your line is healthy and the remaining problem is Wi-Fi coverage. If the wired result is also low, it's the line or the plan, and that's a conversation with your provider — take wired results at two different times of day with you.