"My Wi-Fi keeps dropping" describes at least four different faults, and they have four different fixes. Buying a new router solves one of them. This guide is the order to check things in, cheapest first.
1. Distance and building materials
Wi-Fi at 5 GHz loses roughly twice the signal per metre that 2.4 GHz does, and every brick wall costs you far more than the distance does. A router in the front lounge and a bedroom at the back of the house is not a configuration problem — it is a physics problem.
How to tell: the connection is fine near the router and poor in one specific room. Speed drops but does not stop.
2. Too many devices on one band
Airtime is shared. Forty devices that are idle are fine; four people streaming 4K is not. This is why the Wi-Fi "dies every evening" — the fault is load, not distance.
How to tell: it works at 10am and fails at 8pm, and the problem is everywhere rather than in one room.
3. The router cannot keep up
Older routers handle a few hundred megabits of total traffic. If your line is now 500 Mbps and the router is a 2016 model, the router is the bottleneck inside the house even though the line is fine.
How to tell: a device plugged in with an Ethernet cable is much faster than Wi-Fi from the same room.
4. A dead appliance on the network
A failing device — a smart plug, a printer, an old phone — can wedge the router's wireless. It is rare, and it is the first thing people blame the router for.
How to tell: the whole network drops together, at random, and comes back after a reboot. Disconnect everything and add devices back one at a time.
The four fixes, in order of cost
Move the router. Free. Central, high, not in a cupboard, not next to a microwave or a fish tank, and not on the floor. This alone fixes a surprising number of complaints, because a router inside a wooden cabinet is a router with a wall around it.
Change the channel. Free. On 2.4 GHz, use 1, 6 or 11 — those are the only three that do not overlap. On 5 GHz, most routers pick well; leave it on auto unless you have a reason.
Run a cable. Cheap, and the best answer if you can do it. An access point at the far end of the house, connected by Ethernet, will beat any mesh system that has to push its signal through the same wall twice.
Replace the router with a mesh system. Expensive. This is the right answer when you cannot run a cable and the dead zone is structural.
Where each fix stops working
Moving the router fails when the dead room is behind two solid walls — no position helps. Channel changes fail when the band is genuinely congested by neighbours. A cable fails only when you cannot physically run one. Mesh fails when the units cannot reach each other, which is why placement matters more than the marketing claims.
Two tests, no apps required
Test one: walk toward the router and watch the signal. If it recovers smoothly with distance, it is a coverage problem. If it drops out completely in one spot and returns in another, that is interference or a dead device.
Test two: plug a laptop in with a cable and run the same speed test. If the wired result is fine and Wi-Fi is not, the problem is inside the house, not with your provider.