My router was doing 5 things that I never asked it to, and I wish I had changed them earlier

Published Aug 5, 2026, 10:00 AM EDT After a 7-year corporate stint, Tanveer found his love for writing and tech too much to resist. An MBA in Marketing and the owner of a PC building business, he writes on PC hardware, technology, and Windows. When not scouring the web for ideas, he can be found building PCs, watching anime, or playing Smash Karts on his RTX 3080 (sigh). Once the Wi-Fi router is installed and operational, most people never bother checking the router settings. In the absence of any glaring issues, the router's admin page is rarely visited. The default settings, however, pose security risks and prove bottlenecks to your Wi-Fi performance. You're probably unaware that the solutions to most of your Wi-Fi woes are simple tweaks in the router's settings. While I had tweaked many of my router's settings to optimize my Wi-Fi, some of them had slipped through the cracks. I never used some of these features, while other settings escaped my notice when I upgraded to a Wi-Fi 6 router. When I finally realized my router's default behavior, I disabled or tweaked these settings right away. WPS, UPnP, and remote management Trust me, you don't need them Some of the default settings on your router are gaping security loopholes that can be exploited easily. WPS is the worst of them, since it shouldn't even exist anymore. Intended to simplify client authentication, its susceptibility to brute-force PIN attacks led to it being replaced by modern alternatives. Still, many older and ISP routers ship with WPS enabled, leaving your network exposed. It's one of the first things I should have disabled on my new router. A similar security flaw is the remote management setting that allows your router's admin page to be accessed from the wider internet. Most people don't need to do this at all, so the feature being enabled is nothing but an invitation to hackers who know your public IP address. They can brute-force their way into your router's settings, take over the network, redirect traffic to malicious links, and change the user credentials. Disabling it is the way to go. UPnP, which allows any device on the network to open ports in your firewall, should also be disabled in the router's settings. It doesn't check if the request was authentic, making it possible for a device to open a backdoor into your network. These settings exist for a reason, but most users are better-off disabling them and turning them on only when they need it. WPA2 encryption Switch to WPA3 if possible WPA3 became the standard for network encryption long ago, but WPA2 has persisted due to the need for legacy support and user indifference. Even on my router, I discovered that the WPA2/WPA3 Mixed mode was enabled. While this setting allows older devices and smart home clients to easily connect to the network, it is not as secure as WPA3. The network remains vulnerable to brute-force attacks, exploiting the vulnerabilities inherent to WPA2. WPA3 drops support for WPS, but the presence of WPA2 and WPA2/WPA3 Mixed modes on many routers keeps this security loophole alive. If you don't disable WPS manually when using WPA2, you're trading increased compatibility for reduced security. Slow and questionable DNS servers The ISP defaults are the worst In case you didn't know, the default DNS servers configured by your ISP allow it to monitor which websites you're visiting. This opens the door to targeted advertising and even bandwidth throttling, not to mention the lack of web privacy. For the longest time, I used the default DNS servers on my network for simplicity, but switching to Google or Cloudflare is pretty straightforward. You'll not only maintain your privacy and avoid ads, but also enjoy faster DNS resolution when visiting any website. A DNS speed test shows you multiple suggestions for free and paid DNS servers you can switch to. Alternatively, you can host your own DNS server locally for maximum control and privacy. Auto channel selection Don't blindly trust the router's choice By default, your router is configured to automatically select the best Wi-Fi channel based on the number and strength of neighboring networks on each channel. In dense urban environments, finding a clean wireless channel is nearly impossible, but your router can still scan for the least-crowded channel to minimize co-channel interference. The problem is that auto channel selection is a static snapshot, not a dynamic scan. The surrounding Wi-Fi landscape outside your house might have changed since the last scan, leaving you stuck on a suboptimal channel. Using a tool like WiFi Analyzer to manually find the least crowded channel is the best way to go about it. You can switch to the cleanest channel in your router's settings. Some time later, you might feel that the Wi-Fi speed on the 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz band is subpar. You can run the scan again to find the best channel. I recently switched from channel 6 to channel 11 on my 2.4 GHz network after finding out that the latter had fewer neighboring networks. The speed jumped from around 55 Mbps to 90 Mbps in one of the rooms away from the router, so a manual scan is definitely recommended. 100% transmit power You don't need to blast at full strength The transmit power of your router is the strength with which it broadcasts the signal. You might think that the 100% setting, which is mostly the default, would be best for every device in the house to enjoy a strong signal. In reality, this only contributes to needless radio noise on your Wi-Fi, making it difficult for your client devices to establish a clean connection. Your phone and laptop have relatively weaker radios than your router's, and benefit from reduced radio noise when talking back to your router. Reducing the transmit power in my router's settings from 100% to 75% resulted in a more reliable connection. YouTube stopped buffering as much, WhatsApp uploads became tangibly faster, and the peak time lag in the evenings improved considerably. Not all router defaults target security and stability Many users never touch their router's settings out of fear of messing things up. However, the default settings aren't optimal in many instances. Besides, you might be leaving unpatched security loopholes in your network by sticking to the default settings. Whether it's security or performance, you can improve your Wi-Fi significantly by tweaking your router's settings.