Where's the best place for a WiFi router?

Start from the center, not the corner of a room

The best starting point is the central part of your home, as high as reasonably possible, with as few obstacles as possible between the router and the rooms that matter most.

A router sends its signal in roughly all directions at once. If you put it in a corner of your home, a good chunk of the signal's power leaks through the wall into the stairwell or to a neighbor instead of reaching where it's needed. The closer you are to the geometric center of your home, the shorter the distance to the furthest room — and it's distance, not router “power”, that decides most whether the signal gets through.

Height matters

A router is best placed at a height of around 1–1.5 meters — on a shelf, a dresser, a tall cabinet. WiFi signal spreads best along the plane of the antennas, so a router lying on the floor or tucked behind a monitor loses real range, even if it's physically close by.

Every wall is a signal loss

A drywall partition weakens the signal only slightly. A load-bearing concrete or block wall — much more. That's why two rooms in a straight line from the router, but separated by one load-bearing wall, can end up with worse coverage than a room 5 meters away with nothing in the way.

Metal and mirrors can significantly weaken the signal

Metal doors, cabinets, radiators, and even a large mirror often reflect or block the WiFi signal far more effectively than an ordinary wall. A router placed right next to a metal cabinet or inside a metal distribution box can lose most of its range on the far side of the obstacle — worth checking before you assume the problem is “weak WiFi from the provider.”

Multi-storey homes: a floor slab acts like an extra wall

The slab between floors, especially reinforced concrete, attenuates the signal much like a solid load-bearing wall. If the router sits in a corner on the ground floor and the bedroom is upstairs on the opposite side of the house, the signal has to cross both the distance and the slab — the most common cause of “WiFi that barely works upstairs.”

2.4 GHz or 5 GHz — which band should you choose?

The 2.4 GHz band has a longer range and penetrates walls better, but it's slower and more congested (shared with neighbors' networks, remotes, cameras). The 5 GHz band is faster but loses power much faster with every obstacle. In practice: use 5 GHz for devices near the router (streaming, gaming), and 2.4 GHz as a fallback band for far rooms and IoT devices.

When one router isn't enough

If your home has more than 2–3 rooms in a line from the router, spans multiple floors, or has a lot of load-bearing walls, a single router — even perfectly placed — may not be enough. That's a sign to consider a mesh system instead of looking for one “perfect” spot.

How to check whether the chosen spot actually works

Before you drill a hole for an outlet or run a cable through a wall, it's worth verifying the chosen position. The simplest way: place the router temporarily at that spot and measure the signal strength (RSSI in dBm) at several points in your home. For many home uses, around −67 dBm is often treated as a good reference point in places where you work or watch TV, but the level you actually need depends on the device, the band, and the use case.

Perfect WiFi does this for you based on your floor plan — accounting for walls, square footage, and floors, without having to physically move the router around the whole house.