Signs of a Bad Internet Connection That You Can Fix Today

I’m going to level with you…

I’ve overcome plenty of tech issues over the years, including bad internet connections or having my connection throttled by my ISP.

When the problem isn’t that bad, I usually opt to just deal with it myself instead of wasting hours of my time troubleshooting on the phone with somebody who knows less about how to fix these problems than I do. It’s not that I’m some kind of genius or anything, it’s just that I’ve been around tech all my life and have spent a lot of time troubleshooting just about everything…

In case you didn’t know: ISP stands for internet service provider, and it’s the company who connects your home to the rest of the internet.

If someone like me, who is decently comfortable with this sort of stuff will throw up their hands and say “Forget about it, I’ll just deal with the lag, I DO NOT want to waste all day on the phone with Dumbcast or Lime Larner*…“ Then I really don’t blame you for not wanting to reach out to your ISP, only to get passed around from operator to operator, sitting on hold all afternoon just to get disconnected…

HEADS UP! You can skip to the very end of this page to see a big list of all the different things to check when your internet connection isn’t working correct, or you can read through the article for a more detailed explanation of most of them.

The whole point is to be enjoying your tech, utilizing the services you pay good money for. Is it really that hard to get a decent, reliable internet connection??

* (The L stands for loss, because dealing with these companies is a total loss of time. It wouldn’t be right for this company to have a W in their name.)

If you’re dealing with a bad internet connection and you want to troubleshoot and fix everything you can BEFORE having to call your annoying cable or telecom company, you’re in the right place.

Sidenote: This isn’t about putting blame on the great people who work for these giant telecoms. There are wonderful tech support workers who will move mountains to get your internet connection working again.
However, they are often understaffed and overworked, and call centers can be very stressful jobs. My point is just to remember not to take out your frustrations on the person who answers the phone. Even if they aren’t at their best, it’s probably because they’ve either had 10 people in a row screaming at them and belittling them, or it’s because the ISP simply doesn’t put them in a position to do any better.

My goal with this list of ways to fix a slow internet connection is to help you get up and running at full speed without having to reach out to your ISP.

This means that you can spend more of your day enjoying your free time, or getting your work done in a more productive way instead of sitting on hold with an ISP. When you think about it, this also means that the ISP’s support lines will be slightly less busy. Knowing these telecoms, they’ll probably use that as an excuse to lay people off to ensure that their standard of service stays low.

Anyways, I’ll cut to the chase. All of the above is exactly why I wanted to put this article together.

You can do a LOT of the troubleshooting yourself and you can eliminate many potential causes of a bad or slow internet connection, so follow along with this list.

Even if you don’t solve the problem, at least you’ll have narrowed it down so that you can be certain that it requires a call to the ISP, instead of spending all day on hold, just for them to tell you to reset your router or unplug your devices for a couple minutes.

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Slow-loading websites can be a real pain, especially since we’re used to them loading almost instantly nowadays. A decade or two ago, it wasn’t unusual to have a website hang and pause while loading, but nowadays that’s much less common. When it does happen, it stands out and it’s also a telltale sign that you’ve got a bad internet connection.

Before you call your ISP, try going to your web browser’s menu and clear your cache and cookies. If web pages are loading slowly but everything else seems to be working fine (for example, if you can stream videos without issues), then it could be an issue with your browser. On the other hand, if everything seems to be loading slowly, if Netflix keeps buffering, etc – then keep going, it’s probably not strictly a browser issue.

If you have a lot of tabs open in your browser, this can also slow things down. Closing unneeded tabs and restarting your browser or your computer can help.

It’s also worth taking a moment to download (if you don’t already have one) a different web browser. For whatever reason, the sites you want to visit could be having issues with your default browser so just try another one, it helps to rule things out.

Cache and cookies: These are temporary files that are stored in your browser, and clearing them can help knock loose an issue, sometimes.

When webpages aren’t loading at all, this presents a different set of potential problems compared to when they are loading slowly.

First, check if you’re connected to the internet. Look for the WiFi or Ethernet icons on your device to verify if you’re connected to your router/the internet.

A quick fix that often works is to unplug your router or modem, wait 30 seconds, then plug it back in and give it a few minutes to initialize. This is called a “soft reset”, and you can read more about it here.

Try loading some other websites if the first one you try doesn’t work, this will help you to determine if the issue is with a website or on your end. If other websites load, then there’s likely an issue with just that one site, or at least your ability to connect to it, but at least your internet is working overall.

On that same note, try accessing websites using a different device, if you have it. For this test to be most useful, you will want to ensure this other device is using the same internet connection, for example that it’s connected to the same WiFi.

If it’s still not working with other devices or websites, you could check with your ISP to see if they’re experiencing downtime, or if there’s an error on the account-level.

Some more advanced things you can try include checking your firewall settings, checking your DNS server settings, renewing your IP address, booting your device into safe mode, and scanning for malware/viruses. It’s unlikely to be a settings issue if you haven’t changed anything recently, especially if your internet is working for other applications outside of websites.

More drastic measures include making a new user profile on your device and trying to load the websites from there, or reformatting to see if a fresh start gets things running again.

You’ll notice that the advice to restart your modem or router will appear again and again. Pardon the redundancy, it’s just a really good thing to try for many different internet issues and I want to make sure that people who are skimming this article and skipping ahead to the most relevant section are still seeing the best suggestion.

If you use a wired connection, ensure that the ethernet cable isn’t damaged, and that it is securely connected on both ends (from your modem/router, and into your device). If you have a second cable you can test, this will rule out a faulty cable as the cause. Also, ensure that your modem or router are getting power from the wall, if they aren’t lighting up at all then we have identified the issue.

You can check if there are any updates to your network drivers. Sometimes, you’ll update one piece of a software (Your operating system, your browser, etc) and this can cause problems or require the latest network drivers in order to work. You should be able to find these on the website of the company that sold you your device.

If your having a temporary connection issue, then turning off your device for a few moments, plugging your modem/router, then turning everything back on and waiting 5-10 more minutes (it can take a while for routers to reboot and re-connect) just might do the trick. If not, keep reading.

Note: Make sure to save your work before you restart your device, since any unsaved work will be lost.

Frequent disconnections and an unstable connection can make it really difficult to get anything done, especially since so much work these days is done in the cloud. If you’re working offline in an app on your computer, and your connection isn’t super stable, it’s not as big of a deal.

But if you’ve just spent an hour inputting data into a form or working on something, and you click “Submit” and then all of a sudden the next page won’t load, that’s big trouble – especially since going back will often refresh the previous page, and then you’ve lost all your work.

You can try switching router channels in your router settings, and using an app to analyze which channel could give you the smoothest connection.

If you have certain electronics near your router or device, or in-between their direct path, this can cause interference that would make your connection unstable. Cordless phones, microwaves, and even external hard drives can cause temporary slowness or disconnections. Also, having many devices nearby with Bluetooth and WiFi turned on can also cause problems, so try turning off WiFi on every device except the one that you’re troubleshooting with and see if that does the trick.

Finally, it could be that something is overheating. If your router or moden are in an enclosed space, it’s possible they overheat which causes them to reset or suffer poor performance.

It’s nice to have the excuse of lag when you’re losing at an online game, but it’s a lot nicer to be winning!

If you’re dealing with a high ping and brutal latency in a game, one thing to check is the location of the server you’re connected to.

You can often find this in the game settings, under the multiplayer settings menu. In some cases, you’ll be able to select which server/region you connect to when you first load up the game and log-in to your account. You may need to create a new account when logging into a different region.

If you’re trying to download stuff from the internet, whether it’s a massive game from Steam, important work files, videos, or whatever else and it’s slowed down to a crawl, it’s entirely possible that the server you’re downloading from is just, well, slow.

Hit up fast.com and do a speed test, if everything looks good with your internet connect, try to see if there’s a different source for you to download the file from.

If you’re downloading a torrent, it’s worthwhile you check your settings to make sure that your download speed isn’t limited, or that you aren’t using a torrent that limits your download speed when you haven’t uploaded a sufficient amount.

One of the main things that can feel like a bad internet connection is when your computer is running slowly for other reasons. If you have too many browser tabs open, for instance, it can hog a lot of your computer’s RAM (memory), which can slow things down to a crawl in your browser, which will feel like your internet is slow but the connection isn’t actually the problem in that case. If you’re using a computer that has slots to upgrade your ram, this is a worth while upgrade (Sorry, Apple users on any remotely newer device – as far as I know…)

A lack of RAM isn’t the only thing that can slow down your computer other than a slow internet connection, though. I’ll put together some additional guides on how to troubleshoot a slow computer – so check back!