How to Boost Wi-Fi Signals or Increase Range: The Definitive Guide

In today’s digital era a strong Wi-Fi network is important for so many things in your daily life because nearly all actions and interactions now are based on having a reliable internet connection.  Just one example is how online marketing has a huge share in the market. Sometimes, when you are working on the internet and your network suddenly goes sluggish or your connection drops, sometimes your hard work has gone to waste.  This is especially true for time sensitive activities that may be timed out, or if something failed while transferring documents or files online.   Working with slow Wi-Fi is very frustrating and more than simply frustrating it may impact your ability to get your job done. Accessing information or your work online has become as necessary as breathing. Everyone wants to boost their Wi-Fi speed and in this guide, we will help you to optimize your network to minimize your odds of having Wi-Fi disconnects, slowdowns or other issues.

As mentioned sluggish Wi-Fi networks can negatively affect many aspects of our life, and it can be a reason for significant discomfort as if it influences both our personal and professional lives if the issue remains unsolved.

To aid your quest to boost your WiFi signals, follow these proven processes to boost your WiFi network.

Place Your Router in a Central Part of Your Home

The most probable mistake that a user makes when they use the Wi-Fi setup that users make concerns the placement of a WiFi router. If your router is not optimally placed in your home then you can be left with coverage gaps or deadzones depending on the size and how many floors your house has.  Walls and other obstacles can block Wi-Fi signals and the 5Ghz bandwidth has less range than the 2.4Ghz bandwidth.

Ideal placement for your router is generally the following:

• In the central family or living room.
• You can be putting the router a few inches above floor level on a coffee table to boost the strength of the signal, or mount it on a wall high but not too close to the ceiling.
• Try placing the router in the center of the room, which can cover an area evenly with the WiFi signal.

You can use NetSpotApp or another software which can let you create heatmaps of your Wi-Fi signal from various points in your house and allow you to find out where your signal drops are occurring as well to help isolate and find the perfect spot to place your router or determine if you need a Wi-Fi Extender.  Which brings us to our next option.

Buy a Wi-Fi Booster/ Repeater/ Extender

When a placement or adjustement of the location of your router doesn’t help with certain area’s still having a drop-off of Wi-Fi connectivity or performance, and you are still facing weak Wi-Fi signal problems in some areas of your house.  Try to invest in a Wi-Fi booster/ repeater/ extenders to increase the range/signal strength and speed of your Wi-Fi router in your home. The WiFi range extender will help you extend your WiFi range throughout your home without the additional complicated cables and networking issues WiFi Range extenders are plug and play, though this does vary according to WiFi range-extender model.

A WiFi range extender/ repeater’s cost will be around a hundred dollars and can be installed within a few minutes, though some Wi-Fi boosting apps are required for some Wi-Fi repeaters, and some are designed to work with the existing Wi-Fi setting to get the best result possible.

Though the WiFi range extender signal will almost never be as good as the original when in close proximity it’s better than nothing though if you can connect the repeater with an Ethernet or power line in the place of wireless connectivity it will be much better.

Note an extender will not fix if there is actually a defect in your primary router where the signal loss is caused by a bad antenna or it actually drops Wi-Fi signal as the extender still depends on the source router to have a stable signal to function properly.

Use a Different Wi-Fi Channel

This is listed as the third option but also could be tried as part of the 1st and second options, simply use a tool like InSSIDer or one of the NetSpotApp tool or clones out there to find out how much competition you have in your Wi-Fi channel range and find an unused channel.  In general if not in use the higher channel numbers tend to give you better signal/strength and performance over low channel numbers.  This is an especially important option if you live in apartment complexes or in clustered communities with many people having their own routers in close proximity.  It doesn’t take much for bandwidth overlap to affect other routers performance.

To boost your Wi-Fi signal range by changing channels, all you have to do is manipulate your router settings a bit, try to know which channel has the least amount of traffic in it and switch to it.  Each router software has a different interface whether it be Netgear, Linksys, Asus or TP-Link but they all will give you the option of changing the channel number, some may just have it set to auto and you want to specify a fixed channel number.

Again, Netspot as mentioned earlier is an invaluable tool and it provides a detailed report about your WiFi network and helps you to find and decide which channel has a traffic problem and you should switch to it.

Update your Router Firmware

Most users ignore the risk that their routers face. (Threat of Malware, in 2019) cyber security tells a different story regarding it. If your Wi-Fi routers are not frequently updated, many of these attacks are possible. A business can lose millions of dollars to cyber-attacks, and as convenient and straightforward as it might seem. Here, the only solution is to update your router regularly.  But it isn’t just security risks, for example if someone hacked your router and is using your router to send attacks against other sites, it will be consuming bandwidth and may be also causing severe performance and bandwidth issues for your network.  Also many routers improve performance with firmware updates, an outdated router performs poorly in comparison to an updated router, even when there are no approaches threats present in the routers.

Check out Antenna upgrades

Most of the Wi-Fi routers come with small and weak antennas, but powerful Wi-Fi antennas are to be hideously large. If the user uses an internal antenna, adding an external one would be a useful tool, as tends to send a strong Wi-Fi range or signal. Many router manufacturers sell separating antennas for a stronger range. You can be adding it with your router on yourself, though there aren’t a lot of models that offer antenna customizability there is a way to get external USB Wi-Fi cards for your PC or cards that have external antena’s compare to the internal antenna’s in laptop Wi-Fi chips for example.  Sometimes a client device with a stronger antenna is just as a effective and improving the performance of the router.

Many router models also tend to have performance issue when left on for long periods of time due to cache not clearing up or just firmware flaws.  By doing a hard reboot including a factory reset of your WiFi router, may actually enhance the WiFi signal strength and make your router perform better.  Many router brands actually recommend a hard reset after installing a firmware patch or update.

We hope the above tips will help you to boost your Wi-Fi signal range.