Six Wi-Fi changes that made the biggest difference: band steering, narrower channels, and a wired mesh backhaul
Twenty attempted fixes, six that actually held up, and most of them cost nothing but an evening.
How-To Geek's Monica J. White worked through twenty ways to improve a home Wi-Fi network and reports that six carried the weight. Turning on band steering, which some routers call Smart Connect, let the router move each device onto the band that suits it instead of leaving it parked on a slow one, and narrowing the channel width, rather than assuming 160MHz is always better, reduced overlap with neighboring networks in a crowded building. Moving the static gear onto Ethernet, the desktop, the NAS, the printer, the cameras, freed airtime for everything still wireless, and the mesh point worked better placed between the router and the dead zone than inside it. Wiring that mesh point back to the router for backhaul gave more consistent speeds and lower latency, and the basic extender, which had been repeating an already weak signal, came out of the wall for good.