Start by Finding Out What Is Actually Slow

Before you spend a penny on new kit, work out what you are actually measuring. Run a speed test on a laptop plugged into the router with an Ethernet cable, then run the same test over Wi-Fi from the room where things feel sluggish. If the wired result is also poor, the problem is your broadband line or the router itself, and no amount of aerial twiddling will fix it. If the wired figure is healthy but the wireless one collapses, you have a Wi-Fi problem, and that is usually solvable.

Repeat the test at different times of day. A house that streams perfectly at 10am and stutters at 8pm is telling you about congestion, not distance. Make a note of which rooms are worst, and which devices struggle. A smart TV buffering in the back bedroom is a different fault from a video call dropping in the kitchen.

Move the Router Before You Buy Anything

Most home routers are installed wherever the incoming cable happens to arrive, then left there for years. That is often the worst possible spot. Wireless signals weaken as they pass through brick, stone, foil-backed plasterboard, mirrors, fish tanks and underfloor heating, and a router tucked inside a cupboard under the stairs may as well be in the shed.

Aim for these instead:

• Central in the home, as high as is practical — a hallway shelf or the top of a bookcase beats the floor.
• Out in the open, not behind the television, inside a cabinet, or under a stack of paperwork.
• Away from metal objects, including filing cabinets, radiators and the back of a fridge.
• With aerials upright, or angled to match the layout of the house if yours are adjustable.
• Long enough cabling to reach a better spot. A longer Ethernet lead between the wall socket and the router is cheap, and moving the router thirty feet often helps more than any extender.

If the router must stay where the line enters, that is fine — it simply means planning coverage from that point rather than expecting the whole house to behave.

Cut Down Interference and Pick a Clearer Channel

The 2.4 GHz band is a crowded street. Microwave ovens, baby monitors, wireless doorbells, cordless phone bases and every neighbour's router are all shouting in the same narrow space. The 5 GHz band is quieter and faster but does not travel as far through walls, which is why a device in the garden may drop to 2.4 GHz and slow down.

Practical steps:

• Move the router at least a metre away from cordless phone bases, baby monitors and the microwave.
• Log into the router's admin page and check the channel setting. On 2.4 GHz, only channels 1, 6 and 11 do not overlap; if yours is set to something in between, change it. Most routers pick a channel on start-up and then never reconsider.
• Use a free Wi-Fi scanning app on a phone to see which channels your neighbours occupy, and choose the emptiest of the three.
• Keep the router's firmware updated. Manufacturers fix performance and security problems quietly, and an old firmware version can hold a router back.

Give Priority to the Devices That Need It

A busy family home might have thirty connected devices: phones, tablets, laptops, games consoles, smart speakers, plugs, doorbells and thermostats. Most of them are idle most of the time, but the ones that are streaming, gaming or on a video call need steady air time, and a single struggling device can drag down the rest.

Where possible, split your devices across the two bands — put phones, laptops, consoles and streaming boxes on 5 GHz, and leave the smart plugs and older gadgets on 2.4 GHz. Many routers let you name the two bands separately, which makes this easy to manage. If yours offers a quality-of-service or priority setting, use it for the device that matters most, whether that is a work laptop or a teenager's console. Scheduling is also worth a look: pausing the tablet that is downloading updates at midnight frees bandwidth for everyone else.

Use Wired Connections for Fixed Equipment

The single biggest improvement in most homes is taking the fixed kit off Wi-Fi altogether. Anything that never moves — smart TVs, games consoles, desktop computers, set-top boxes, network storage — will be faster and more reliable on a cable. It also frees wireless capacity for the devices that genuinely need it.

If running cable is impractical, powerline adapters, which send data through your existing electrical wiring, are a reasonable compromise. They work best when both adapters are on the same ring main, and they can struggle across separate consumer units or long runs. Plug them directly into wall sockets rather than extension leads, especially surge-protected ones, and expect real-world speeds to be lower than the figures on the box.

Extending Coverage Without Wasting Money

If a couple of rooms remain stubbornly weak, an extender is not always the answer. Cheap repeaters halve the speed they pass on and often sit in the same dead spot they are meant to cure. A mesh system with two or three units will usually do a better job, particularly if you can connect the units back to the main router with cable — that wired backhaul is what makes mesh systems perform at their best.

For larger or older properties, a separate wireless access point wired back to the router gives the strongest, most stable result, and lets you position coverage exactly where it is needed. Whichever route you take, change one thing at a time and re-test afterwards, so you know what actually worked.