Measure before you change anything
Run the ping test and note three numbers from the detail panel: the lowest ping, the median, and the 95th percentile. The lowest is your line's floor, set by technology and distance. The difference between that floor and the others is queueing and interference, which is the part you can reduce at home. If your median is already within a few milliseconds of the minimum, there is not much left to gain locally, and the remaining delay is distance to the server.
Fixes that lower ping
- 1. Use Ethernet. Wifi adds a few milliseconds even when it is working well, and tens of milliseconds of spikes when it is not. A cable removes both.
- 2. Stop uploads. A full upload is the most common reason for a ping that suddenly doubles. Cloud photo backups, game streaming to Twitch and file sync are the usual culprits.
- 3. Pause downloads. Game and system updates in the background fill the download queue. Consoles do this in rest mode.
- 4. Enable SQM or QoS on the router. Smart queue management keeps queues short when the line is busy, which is the direct cure for bufferbloat. Routers running OpenWrt, and many recent gaming routers, have it.
- 5. Restart the router. A router that has been running for weeks can slow down as its connection tables fill.
- 6. Choose a closer server or region. Distance is ping. Selecting the nearest region in a game often saves more than any setting at home.
- 7. Close background apps on the device. Browser tabs with video, launchers updating other games and sync clients all use the connection.
- 8. Move to 5 GHz or closer to the router. If a cable is impossible, a stronger, less crowded wifi signal cuts retries and the delay they add.
- 9. Change technology. Moving from DSL to cable or fibre, or from geostationary satellite to low-orbit, changes the floor itself. It is the only fix for a high minimum.
Things that do not lower ping
Changing DNS servers does not change ping during a game, because DNS is only used to find the server's address before connecting. "Ping reducer" and "game booster" apps generally either do nothing or reroute your traffic through their own servers, which can help on a bad route and hurt on a good one; see does a VPN fix packet loss for the same logic. Buying a faster plan lowers ping only if your line is regularly full, in which case the cheaper fix is usually to manage what is filling it.
Checking that it worked
After each change, run the test again at the same time of day, on the same device. Compare the median and the 95th percentile rather than the single best number. The 95th percentile is the one that decides how a game feels, because it describes the slowest one in twenty packets, and that is the packet you notice. A fix that lowers the median by 2 ms and the 95th percentile by 40 ms is a much bigger improvement than it looks.