Suppose you use a VPN to hide your IP address, protect your identity and personal information, or secure your connection from unwanted people and hackers. In that case, you’ll notice that your speed slows down slightly compared to when you’re not using a VPN.
How to Speed Up Your VPN on Any Device
This means it will take longer to download files, get to websites, and stream movies. The best practices for increasing VPN speed on any device without jeopardizing security or identity are listed below.
Why Connection Speed Gets Slower with a VPN
Your data is kept safe by a VPN because it encrypts it. So that no one, not even your internet service provider (ISP) or the government, can use your information; this process is done to secure the data between the user and the VPN server tunnel.
All your Internet actions pass through a secure tunnel to an outside server. When your connection requests are encrypted before being sent to the server, however, it takes time for these internet bits to get from your end to the receiver. Once the data has been sent to the right person, it is changed back into a format that can be read.
Many VPN service providers, like ExpressVPN, have already improved their speed to fix this problem. But if your VPN connection is still slowing down, here are the steps you should take.
What Affects Your VPN Connection Speed
There are two parts to a VPN connection’s speed: throughput, which is the amount of data sent in a certain amount of time, and latency, which is the amount of time it takes to send a request to a server and get an answerback.
Throughput and latency can be affected therefore by:
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So, the following things can affect both throughput and latency:
- How far are you from the VPN server you want to use
- Which VPN protocol is used depends on
- The number of users who are currently connected to a VPN server
- How good are your hard-wired and cellular connections are
There are several methods to fix a slow connection speed when using a VPN.
10 Best Practices on How to Make Your VPN Speed Much Faster
These ten ways have been shown to improve the speed of your VPN. However, you may also need to do more than one of the best practices to get the desired speed.
1. Restart your device, modem and/or router.
If you’ve been spending too much time in front of the computer, your devices may need restarting to clear out RAM and start new. This will also fix some problems with your system that are causing your VPN connection to be slower.
To clear the cache on your router, you need to restart it or turn it off and on again. This will also help your router choose a less busy channel.
Lastly, if you want your device to work as well as it did when it was new, you may need to return it to its original settings. Just remember that everything on the system will be deleted if you do that.
2. Change your VPN protocol.
The software uses a set of codes with a VPN protocol when the VPN encryption changes your data into a format that can’t be read. So the best security can be obtained by using a VPN protocol with a higher bit encryption but at the expense of speed.
Most VPN companies today connect users to the protocol that works best with the network they are on. But if you want to control your VPN protocol, you can set it up based on the choices offered by your VPN service provider.
ExpressVPN’s Lightway connection, which only has about 2,000 lines of code, is trustworthy. It’s faster than most things and uses less power on your device. In addition, if your connection drops suddenly, it instantly reconnects you, whereas other VPN protocols can take at least 15 seconds to complete the same process. Our independent tests also showed that it is about 2 Mbps faster than WireGuard and other protocols when downloading and about 3 Mbps faster when uploading.
If you use a mobile device and want to load pages faster without draining your power, choose ChaCha20, a faster cipher than AES-128 GSM.
3. Switch to a Wired Connection.
Check if your wifi connection is slow by running a speed test. Then, switch to a wired or ethernet connection to get a dedicated bandwidth. A wired connection gives you faster speed because it doesn’t get as much interference, and you don’t have to share the wireless network’s bandwidth with other users, who add to the traffic.
4. Update your device’s software.
5. Choose a server that is not overloaded.
When you join to a VPN server, you share it with thousands of other users. So check how busy the server is before connecting so you can switch to a less busy choice. If you can’t do this, try connecting to different servers to determine which gives you the fastest speed.
6. Connect to a server nearer your location.
You can speed up your loading time by moving your server to a location closer to you. However, it will take longer to transmit data packets if the VPN server you choose is far away from your actual location because it must pass through more networks. Some packets may also get lost along the way, and the latency can be affected by the amount of bandwidth in foreign borders.
When geo-spoofing to access material that isn’t available for streaming or download where you are, we advise you to choose a VPN server that is far away from your location at that time.
7. Disable your antivirus or firewall for a moment.
Before allowing data packets to pass through your network, your antivirus software and firewall check and screen them. This process can greatly slow down your internet speed and the way you send and receive data.
You may briefly disable your antivirus and firewall if you download from a reputable website to improve your connection speed. But remember to turn them back on when you’re done so that viruses and worms can’t get into your system.
8. Enable split tunneling.
If you can’t avoid using multiple apps simultaneously, review to see if your VPN provider has a “split tunneling” tool that lets you give different apps different amounts of bandwidth.
Selecting websites that can run through the VPN tunnel while leaving the others to your standard connection can be made easier by doing this.
9. Reduce the number of active apps running in the background.
When you run too many apps with too much bandwidth, it can be hard for your ideal speed to keep up with your needs.
Check to see if any apps can be closed to improve your connection speed, leaving only the programs you need to finish your job.
10. Switch to a different VPN provider such as ExpressVPN.
Only some VPN companies offer the same speed. For example, our independent testing found that ExpressVPN has some of the fastest speeds among the top VPNs today.
Compared to a non-VPN connection, there was very little speed loss when we connected to its servers in the United States, and we hit 110 Mbps. Likewise, connecting to a server in another country, like one in Europe, didn’t slow down the speed much.