Giving guests the wifi without being asked twice

The wifi is the thing guests ask about more than anything else, and it is almost never the router. It is how the password was written down.

The four ways it goes wrong

A photo of the router

It is the obvious thing to do and it fails constantly. The label is small, printed in a typeface that makes zero and capital O look identical, often behind furniture and photographed at an angle. It also freezes the password at the moment of the photograph, so the day somebody changes it the picture quietly becomes wrong.

Not saying how it is typed

You know your password has no capitals. Nobody else does. Saying so is one short clause and it removes the single most common failure on this page.

The characters that look like other characters

Four pairs cause nearly all of it, and in a password you did not choose you may not have noticed which one you have:

• the number 1, a lowercase l and a capital I
• the number 0 and a capital O
• a hyphen, an en dash and an underscore, especially if it was pasted from somewhere
• a trailing space, which is invisible and which copying from a document adds for free

If your password contains any of them, say which it is. "The l is a lowercase L, not a one" is eight words that save a phone call.

More than one network, and no sign of which

A house with a 2.4GHz and a 5GHz network, or a mesh system, or a neighbor with a similarly named router, presents a guest with a list and no way to choose. Name the one they want in full, exactly as it appears in the list, and say what to do if they picked the wrong one.

Where to put it

Two places, and they are not alternatives, because they fail in opposite situations.

• Somewhere physical in the house. A small card on the fridge or the bedside table. This is the copy that works when a phone is dead, when the signal is bad on arrival, or when the guest is a person who does not want to go hunting through a message thread.
• Somewhere they can copy from. A page on their phone they can open and copy the password out of. This is the copy that works when the password is sixteen mixed-case characters, which no one types correctly on a phone keyboard on the second attempt.

The guest network

If your router has a guest network option, turning it on is about five minutes of work and worth doing for two reasons that have nothing to do with trust. It keeps guests off the same network as anything of yours still plugged in at the house, including cameras, printers and storage. And it means you can change the guest password without re-pairing every device you own, which is what actually stops people from ever changing it.

Give the guest network a name that says what it is. "Blue Heron Guest" tells somebody standing in the kitchen which of the six networks in range is theirs; "NETGEAR57-5G" does not.

QR codes

A wifi QR code is a small square that connects a phone when its camera is pointed at it, and on a current iPhone or Android it works without any app. It is genuinely nice for the people it works for. It is no use at all to an older phone, a laptop, a games console or a smart television, and those are in the house too.

So treat it as a shortcut rather than a replacement. Print it if you like it, and write the network name and the password underneath it, in full, in the format above.

A card for the kitchen

This is the whole of it, and it fits on an index card:

And when you change it

The day you change the password, change it in all of the places you wrote it down. The reason hosts get wifi questions from guests who were given the password correctly is almost always that it was changed once, eighteen months ago, and the card on the fridge never caught up. Keeping the answer in one place that every copy points at is the only version of this that survives.

Questions