A Mum’s guide to speeding up your internet connection

Anyone with kids or teenagers in their house will know that they love all things internet, whether it’s watching films, playing games or dossing about on social media. With most of these applications requiring a high-speed connection, you can quickly see your bandwidth being drained by your offspring, leaving you at the mercy of the infamous spinning pizza wheel when you finally sit down to watch your favourite series on Netflix. Fear not, however, as there are things you can do to speed up your connection which we have outlined below…

• Get a faster broadband package. OK, this is obvious, but worth discussing anyway. Perhaps it’s time to upgrade to get a faster connection for all your needs. It’s a pretty easy process – find a broadband deals comparison site such as cable.co.uk and take it from there.
• Reset the router now and again. Tedious but effective, as resetting the router stimulates the connection to your ISP meaning speed should improve if you experience a temporary slow down. You can buy timers that do this automatically if you want to avoid the manual way!
• Move the router: Not always possible, but if you can move the router to either the middle of your house or nearer to where you spend the most time consuming the bandwidth, such as close to bedrooms or the lounge etc and you should see a noticeable speed improvement.
• Use an ethernet cable rather than wi-fi: wi-fi is more convenient but an ethernet connection is likely to be faster and give a more dependable speed. If your device is near the router this reduces the amount of inconvenience of using one. Devices that take this kind of connection include TVs, laptops and game consoles.
• Use an ad blocker: Rich media ads such as autoplay videos can slow down your internet browsing capacity but by using an adblocker you can reduce the number of ads you come across online.
• Streamline your browser tabs: How many tabs do you really need open at once? If you really want to save everything you are looking at try a plugin like Session Buddy which will save your tabs for next time you need to see them all. Otherwise, close all the ones you are not using.
• Clear the cache: Clear the what? Yes, the cache is basically temporary storage data of all your recently visited websites. This is handy when you want to quickly revisit these pages as the browser will suggest them when you start typing the domain name. The bad news is this data can stack up and impact overall browsing speeds, so it’s prudent to periodically clear your browsing cache.
• Use a fast browser: If you have a Windows PC it will have had Microsoft internet explorer bundled as the default browser. However this is not the fastest way to browse the web, so download Chrome or Safari for a faster browsing experience.