Where Is the Best Place to Set Up Your Router?

The best place to set up your router is in a central, unobstructed location to ensure you have a strong Wi-Fi signal throughout your home. Moving your router even just a few feet might save you from endless connection problems and allow you to get the most out of your internet connection. Use the tips in the table below when choosing a spot for your router.

Of course, homes come in all shapes and sizes, and there are often other practical limitations on where you can put your router.

Let’s go over the details and reasoning of these key router placement rules. This can help you make the best decision when forced to compromise between optimal Wi-Fi coverage and the limitations of your home’s design.

Choosing the best location for your router

When positioning your router in your house, the goal is to put it somewhere that takes advantage of the shape of your Wi-Fi signal and avoids interference. Here are some basic rules to help you do that.

Put your router in a central location

Since the Wi-Fi signal goes out in all directions, the best way to make sure that all of the rooms in your house are in range of the signal is to place the router in the most central location possible. Most modern routers have enough range to completely cover a moderately sized home if placed near the center.

Minimize router obstructions

As you probably know, Wi-Fi signals have a low enough frequency that they can pass through objects like walls. But materials like metal, stone, water, and tile can severely weaken or even block Wi-Fi signals. When choosing a spot for your router, think about what will be in between the router and the most important Wi-Fi zones in your home, like an office or living room.

Also, while Wi-Fi can pass through walls, doing so does weaken the signal somewhat–avoid walls where you can. An ideal situation would be to have a direct line of sight between your device and the router. For devices in other rooms, you’ll want to place the router in the spot where its signal has to pass through the lowest number of walls in order to reach the device.

Elevate your router

Often you can improve the signal of your home network by simply raising your router off the ground. This helps avoid large pieces of furniture that might block the line of sight, as well as preventing a good chunk of your signal from being transmitted straight into the ground. You can do this by setting it on top of a table or bookshelf if you have one nearby. You can also purchase a wall mount for your router as well.

One exception to this rule is people with multistory homes. Since you still want the router in the most central location, the best place for a router in a two-story home would be near the ceiling on the first floor or near the floor on the second floor. In either case, remember to consider the placement of your furniture so you don’t block your signal.

Avoid other electronics

Just as walls and large objects can interfere with your Wi-Fi signal, so can electronic devices. TVs and computers certainly fall into this category, but the biggest culprits are microwaves. The radiation put out by a microwave is pretty close to the wavelength of Wi-Fi signals, so it’s almost guaranteed to cause problems for your Wi-Fi if you set them up side by side.

How do Wi-Fi signals work?

Every Wi-Fi router has one or more antennas for transmitting its signal. On some routers, these antennas are built in to the structure of the device, but more often the antennas stick up from the router like the rabbit ears of an old television and can be moved and adjusted.

Each antenna puts out a signal as a series of electromagnetic waves. Most Wi-Fi routers are equipped with omnidirectional antennas, so these signals go out in all directions but are strongest in an elliptical shape perpendicular to the antenna. In other words, if you imagine the signal in the shape of a donut, the antenna would stick straight through the hole.

Adjusting your antennas

If your router has adjustable antennas, it’s a good idea to point them in different directions. This allows you to spread out your signal to reach more of the house, but it can also help devices make a stronger connection. Receivers work best when they’re parallel to the antenna, so antennas pointing at multiple angles make it more likely that the receiver in your device will line up with one of them.

It’s important to remember that while the coverage shape of your Wi-Fi signal is big and round, the signal itself goes in a straight line. This means that if an object is blocking the signal between the router and your device, the signal can’t curve around it (although you will get a bit of signal bouncing off other surfaces).

Tips for dealing with Wi-Fi dead zones

Even if you’ve found the ideal spot where you’d like to set up your router, there are often practical considerations that prevent you from doing so. Your cable,  fiber, or DSL outlet may be in an inconvenient spot, and some homes simply have unusually shaped floor plans. If this is the case, there are still a few more tips and tricks you can try to improve your Wi-Fi coverage.

Prioritize high-use areas

While a central location is the best way to reach every room of your house, some areas may take priority over others. For example, if your home office and living room are on the same side of the house, you might want to put your router closer to those rooms—even if it means a weaker signal in the kitchen.

While it’s ideal to have consistent home-wide Wi-Fi coverage, if your circumstances make a few dead spots unavoidable, it’s best if you get to choose where they are.

Use Ethernet cables

Depending on the layout of your home, you might end up with dead zones where you simply can’t get a good Wi-Fi signal. This might be in a room that was a later addition to the house or simply an area that’s in the shadow of an abnormally thick wall. An easy solution to this problem is to use an Ethernet cable. Unlike a Wi-Fi signal that’s transmitted in a straight line, you can wind your internet around any obstacle with a long enough Ethernet cable.

This solution is somewhat less practical for very large homes, but it’s great for people who really want to put their computer in that little nook with no Wi-Fi. Learn more about whether a direct Ethernet connection is right for your situation in our Ethernet vs. Wi-Fi article.

Get a specialized router

If your home is simply too big for your router to handle or has an overabundance of dead zones, you might want to invest in a different kind of router. Long-range routers allow you to cover a much larger area with a single router. There are also Wi-Fi extenders and mesh routers that can allow you to both cover a large area and transmit your signal around obstacles.

For more tips and tricks, check out our guide to getting wireless internet in every room of your home.

Use a Wi-Fi extender

Wi-Fi extenders create another access point in your Wi-Fi network by repeating the internet signal broadcast from your router. Extenders are a quick, easy, and affordable way to get a stronger signal to Wi-Fi trouble areas in your home. The downside is most extenders double your connections latency, which may cause you to experience a delay in certain applications like online gaming, video calls, and any activity that relies are responsive internet connectivity. But if you just need to get a little more wireless bandwidth for streaming and browsing, extenders are low-hassle solution.