Tech Tip: Home (WiFi) for the Holidays

There’s no place like home for the holidays, but hosting friends and family in your home also requires plenty of preparation. There are cookies to be baked, stockings to be hung, and gifts to be wrapped. And then there’s the question of your Wi-Fi: will it be able to handle the sudden increase in traffic?

Today, we have five tips to get your Wi-Fi ready for the holidays. If you are more of a visual learner, watch our latest Tech Tip video to follow along with tech expert Riley. Let’s get started!

5 Tips to Get Your Wi-Fi Holiday-Ready

1. Location, location, location. The most important factor in ensuring the strength of your home Wi-Fi signal is the location of your router. Your router should be placed in a central location so that devices in every corner of your home can reach it. And make sure it’s out in the open; objects like appliances, walls, and cabinets can interfere with or block your Wi-Fi signal, causing slow speeds.
2. Restart your router. Just like humans, routers need a little break from time to time in order to keep working at top speeds. Restarting is one of the simplest troubleshooting steps you can take to fix an internet connection that isn’t working properly.
3. Identify activities that use the most data. Downloading large files, streaming video, and sharing files can take up a lot of bandwidth and slow down your Wi-Fi. If your network is running slowly, make sure you don’t have any programs running that use lots of data. 
4. Keep your network secure. Make sure your network is protected by a strong password, and only share that password with the people you want to grant access to your Wi-Fi. This will keep any unwanted guests from connecting and crowding your network, which can really slow things down.
5. Give your Wi-Fi a boost. If there are areas in your home—like, say, a guest room in the basement—where you know your signal is weak, consider purchasing a Wi-Fi extender. These devices connect to your router and help transmit its signals to the farthest corners of your home without requiring you to purchase an additional router.

That’s it for this edition of Tech Tips! While we can’t guarantee that your Christmas cookies will come out of the oven perfectly, with these five tips, we can ensure that your Wi-Fi is ready when your guests arrive. Check back soon for another tip to make your technology work for you.