Short answer: put your router somewhere central to the rooms where you use Wi-Fi, raised off the floor, out in the open, and away from big metal objects and other electronics. NETGEAR and TP-Link give the same core advice: a central, open, elevated spot.

The four rules

  1. Central to your devices. TP-Link makes a useful point: “central” means the center of wherever your devices actually are, not the geographic middle of the house. If you mostly use Wi-Fi upstairs at one end, that end is your center.
  2. Raised off the floor. NETGEAR recommends a shelf or table rather than the floor, and TP-Link suggests about 1 to 1.5 ft up, so the signal sits on the same plane as most of your devices.
  3. Out in the open. Both NETGEAR and TP-Link advise against hiding the router in a closet, cabinet or media drawer. Besides blocking the signal, enclosed spaces trap heat.
  4. Not in a corner or against an outside wall. NETGEAR advises against corners and walls, and TP-Link points out that a router on an exterior wall sends much of its signal outside the house.

Why placement matters so much

Wi-Fi gets weaker with distance and with every obstacle it passes through. Lower frequencies reach further: 2.4 GHz has the longest range of the three Wi-Fi bands, so the faster 5 GHz and 6 GHz bands are the first to fade as you move away. See Wi-Fi bands explained for the trade-offs.

What the signal passes through matters too. In NIST laboratory measurements, typical interior materials such as drywall, plywood and glass absorbed relatively little signal, while concrete absorbed the most. A router behind a concrete or brick wall loses far more than one behind a stud wall.

What to keep it away from

  • Metal and water. TP-Link lists refrigerators, filing cabinets and metal-frame mirrors as objects that reflect or absorb Wi-Fi, and notes that a large fish tank can create an unexpected gap.
  • Other 2.4 GHz devices. Microwaves, baby monitors, cordless phones and Bluetooth devices can interfere with the 2.4 GHz band. Keep the router a few feet away from them, especially the microwave.

Antennas

If your router has adjustable antennas, TP-Link recommends pointing them straight up when you only need coverage on one floor, and angling them at about 30 degrees when the signal needs to reach other floors.

Two-story homes

For a two-story home, NETGEAR suggests a central spot on the first floor, and says that placing it high on the first floor or low on the second floor can help coverage reach both levels.

Mesh points

Mesh points follow the same rules, plus one more: each one has to hear the others well. Google’s guidance for its Nest Wifi systems is to place points about 2 to 3 rooms apart, elevated, with a clear line of sight between them, and not to put a point in the weak spot itself but halfway toward it. A point sitting in the dead zone has a weak link back, so everything connected to it is slow too. For how many points you need, see how many mesh nodes do you need?, and for cabling them together, mesh backhaul explained.

Check the result

If one device is still slow, Microsoft’s own troubleshooting advice is to bring it closer to the router and away from obstructions to see whether distance is the cause. If a room is still weak after you’ve found the best spot, how to fix Wi-Fi dead zones walks through the remaining causes, and mesh Wi-Fi vs router vs extender covers adding coverage.