Wi-Fi is almost a necessity of modern life, especially if you're a freelancer. But nothing ruins your day faster than a Wi-Fi connection that feels sluggish, especially if you've run a speed test and everything seems fine. You might see full bars of connectivity, but your phone or laptop refuses to navigate the web, with spinning wheels on websites or slow asset loading. Or maybe browsing to a new website doesn't get any connectivity at all, leaving you frustrated.
What if I told you that speed tests are an easy workload for your devices, and they can easily lull you into complacency? They're an ideal workload, not at all the type of data transfer that happens when you're browsing the internet. They also don't show DNS issues, tell you about wireless connectivity glitches or other things that could be slowing down your devices.
4 networking tools I always use when diagnosing slow home internet
Don't call your ISP just yet. There are some things you can try first.
Why speed tests aren't the whole picture
They only really tell you what's going on outside your network
Speed tests are an important indicator of the service your ISP is providing to you, but they're fairly useless past that point. They don't test a realistic workload of dozens of small objects loading from a webpage, or multiple DNS lookups, or navigate long paths to remote resources.
That's not to say they are useless, but they test sustained data transfers from local servers or CDN endpoints, not the kind of thing that is slowing down your Wi-Fi. The two best-known are listed below, and TestMyNet's testing method is preferred.
You could try switching to a server farther away and see how the speeds change, but that still won't tell you why your wireless connection feels slow, even if it tests at the full speed of your ISP-provided link.
A perfect pathway to a nearby, friendly server
Internet speed tests are handled by nearby CDN nodes, whether it's Ookla or another provider handling the connectivity for you. That can mean that they show you a picture of your connectivity that isn't real-world usage, because the network path has few obstructions:
- Few hops
- Uncongested, high-capacity links
- Inside or directly peered with your ISP's core network
If you're having issues connecting to certain websites or game servers, the path may be very different. It's rare for a website to need only one domain to resolve, even if the other domains are for advertising networks. Plus, the hosting could be on older hardware, or slower links, or not cached correctly with their CDN, all contributing to the sluggish feeling you're experiencing, even when your internet connection has no issues.
Your mesh Wi-Fi isn't the problem, your backhaul is
Running wires beats running circles around the problem
Wireless connectivity is complicated
There could be any number of things going on
The speed-testing sites will usually tell you to test on a wired connection because Wi-Fi is affected by many variables. The device you're testing on, the quality of your router, which Wi-Fi version each is using, how many antennas are being used, the distance between them, any obstacles or differing materials in between, and the quality of the chipsets in each device.
And that's before considering latency, which is more noticeable than speed as we pick up on responsiveness faster than we do anything else, issues like bufferbloat, where oversized buffers in various pieces of networking equipment can park your browsing data in long queues, even if speed tests look normal, wireless interference, and even Wi-Fi airtime issues if you have lots of devices connected.
Speed tests don't always test the uplink correctly, and if multiple devices or people are using a lot of data at once, you can saturate the link, slowing down everything from DNS queries to HTTP requests and ACKs for downloads. Changing your DNS servers might help here, especially if your ISP blocks certain resources, but it could also be a simple issue of your router's CPU being overloaded by firewall rules, NAT, or concurrent flows. The only real solution is a new router.
Your device could be the issue
Some phones or laptops are known to have weak Wi-Fi chipsets, poor antennas, and might show high bars for connectivity but not really be able to connect at the speeds they're rated for. It could be that they're not switching from 5GHz to 2.4GHz when range is an issue, or have glitchy algorithms governing when they switch between cellular and Wi-Fi data.
Software, browser extensions, security software, and more can add latency to your perceived speeds, even if they don't affect speed tests. Always try testing wireless connections on a second device if you can, to see if it's an individual device or your whole network. And use speed tests to check latency when you feel like your wireless is slowing down, to see if it actually is or maybe it's your device being sluggish.
I thought my Wi-Fi problems were interference, but it turns out it was airtime
An abject lesson in the perils of overcrowding any access point
Internet speed tests don't give you a full picture of your Wi-Fi connection
If you've gone through the usual battery of tests to diagnose a sluggish wireless connection, it might be time to consider your Wi-Fi router's age and whether you want to upgrade. It could be that your router or the device that regularly has slowdowns has deteriorated slightly, and the older hardware is the issue. Wi-Fi routers usually last 5 or more years, at least at the consumer level, so think back to when you first got it and do some quick calculations.