What’s more annoying than having a great wifi or Ethernet connection, but slow internet speeds? Nothing. Nothing is more annoying than that. When it happens to you—and it will, especially if you jump onto wifi access points at your favorite local businesses—you’re going to wish you could do anything to speed up your connection.
While we can’t reach out from Lifehacker Headquarters and tell your public wifi point to speed things up, nor can we tell that person next to you at the coffee shop to maybe go easy on the BitTorrent today, we can give you a few suggestions to troubleshoot, fix, or simply survive a slow internet connection.
1. Fix your wifi signal
Speaking of wifi, you might find that your router and internet are fine, but your wireless signal is weak. This can cause a slowdown—or, at minimum, a latency-filled browsing experience. In that case, you may need to reposition, tweak, and boost your router with a few tricks.
There are more than we could share in one paltry paragraph—in fact, we have a whole top 10 list just for fixing wifi, so check that out if you suspect your wireless signal is the problem. (And, yes, there are plenty of free apps you can use to check signal problems and see how well your router handles the rest of your concrete house.)
2. Turn off or limit bandwidth-hogging apps
If your hardware seems to be in working order, see if any other programs are hogging the connection. For example, if you’re downloading files with BitTorrent, regular web browsing is going to be slower. You should also try installing extensions like AdBlock Plus and Privacy Badger, which will block some of the bandwidth-hogging ads, animations, and videos that can use up your connection. (You can also try a different browser entirely, like the privacy-minded Brave.)
3. Use Internet Download Manager
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4. Try a new DNS server
When you type an address into your browser, your computer uses something called DNS to look up and translate that into a computer-friendly IP address. Sometimes, though, the servers your computer uses to look up that information can have issues, or go down entirely. Thankfully, you have plenty of faster, free options to use, like Google DNS or Cloudflare (to name two of our favorites). Or you can use a utility like Namebench to actually test what’s the speediest for your location and go with that.
A better DNS might not speed up average webpage loading time enough for you to notice, but you never know—milliseconds are milliseconds.
4. Call your internet provider
If you’ve gone through all the necessary troubleshooting steps and your internet is still slow, then it’s time to call your internet provider and see if the problem is on their end. Remember: don’t just assume they’ve done something wrong, and treat your customer service representative with respect. You’re much more likely to get good results.
And while you’re at it, you might want to see if you can get a better deal on your internet—especially if they’ve been giving you the wrong speeds all this time.