5 Surprising Tools That Will Improve Your Home WiFi

Slow speeds and dreaded dead zones are two things that nobody should be worrying about in 2025 – particularly when so many people earn their living at home. Yet, we continue to put up with sluggish speeds and intermittent connection, even in a time where 4G is achievable on the top of a Norwegian mountain. 

While these issues can sometimes be down to the local infrastructure, there is more often than not a way to solve them at home.

Mapping Your WiFi Landscape

Router placement is often guesswork. It’s a matter of plug it in and hope for the best, often wherever the engineer decided to put it, which is next to an external wall. This inevitably means that most households have suboptimal coverage. 

A Wi-Fi heatmap is the primary solution here. They are visual representations of your signal strength all around the home. Imagine a digital blueprint showing Wi-Fi “hotspots” and weak zones, a bit like a football heatmap. 

These apps, which are easily downloadable, use readings taken from your devices in your home. The process is simple: walk around your house with the app active, and it will paint a picture of whether your signal is strong or weak. This can help inform you where you should either move the router to, or where extenders need to be used. Sometimes, even a small movement can eradicate dead zones.

Also Read: How to Remove Devices from Your Wi-Fi?

Channel Surfing 

Your Wi-Fi router transmits on specific channels, which are like lanes on a highway. Overcrowding on a single channel causes interference. Think of it as rush hour traffic, and this can slow down your internet. A Wi-Fi analyzer is the tool for this issue, as they applications scan your environment and identify busy channels near you. 

Within these analyzers, you just need to find the least crowded channel and switch your router to that channel via its settings (either browse the user manual or ask ChatGPT to run you through the steps). 

The Power of Mesh 

Traditional Wi-Fi extenders have limitations as they often create a secondary network. These extenders can introduce performance bottlenecks, which throttle your download speeds. Mesh Wi-Fi is a superior solution here, and systems like Google Wifi Eero or Netgear Orbi use multiple nodes. 

These nodes create one seamless network and helps make sure you have a strong signal coverage throughout your home. You don’t have to switch networks in this case (e.g., when you move between rooms), which could cause you to disappear from your important Zoom call. 

Also Read: What is a Portable WiFi Router and How Does it Work?

Firmware Updates 

Your router relies on firmware, which is something many of us don’t think about. This software controls its hardware, of course, and manufacturers often release updates for bug fixes. While updates are most important for security, these can actually provide performance improvements. A lack of updating can sometimes cause poor Wi-Fi performance, or strange anomalous behavior. 

Check for firmware updates regularly, which is typically done via your router’s web interface – but some modern ones may use a mobile app. Of course, schedule this kind of downtime when you don’t need the internet, as the update will cut you off temporarily.

QoS 

Quality of Service (QoS) is something less known about, but it’s a feature inside your router’s settings. QoS essentially lets you prioritize network traffic types – such a prioritizing traffic for video streaming, providing smoother playback. 

Or, perhaps you want to prioritize gaming for lower latency and will prevent one application from hogging all the bandwidth. Essentially, it’s a way to more equally distribute your network traffic, and will prevent your work meetings from being interrupted by a child downloading new Steam game. Again, this is done via your router’s settings page.

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