Setup guide

Change DNS on your router

One change that covers every device on the network — including the ones with no DNS settings of their own. Also the change with the widest blast radius if it goes wrong.

Before you change anything

Photograph or write down the current DNS fields before editing them. Many routers show the ISP-assigned servers in these boxes, and there is no undo button.
Do this from a device connected by cable if you can. If the change disrupts the network you still want a way back into the admin interface.
On a router you do not own — a landlord’s, an employer’s, a shared house — do not change it. It affects everyone on that network.
On a work, school or campus network, a custom resolver commonly breaks internal hostnames, intranet sites and VPN resources that depend on split DNS. If anything internal stops resolving, that is the cause — revert first, investigate second.
Captive portals on hotel and airport Wi-Fi often will not appear until you go back to the network’s own DNS.
Changing resolver changes what is filtered. Moving to an unfiltered resolver switches off malware or adult-content blocking you may currently rely on; moving to a filtering one can block sites that used to work.
Your chosen resolver can see every domain your device looks up. Changing DNS moves that visibility from your ISP to the new provider. It does not make your lookups invisible, and it does not hide which sites you visit from anything else on the path.

Two settings that are easy to confuse

Nearly every consumer router has both, and they do different things:

WAN / Internet DNS — the resolvers the router itself uses. Devices are usually still told to use the router as their resolver, and the router forwards to these. This is the setting you normally want.
LAN / DHCP DNS — the resolvers the router hands directly to each device. This bypasses the router’s own forwarding, which also means local hostnames served by the router may stop resolving.

If local device names (a printer, a NAS, router.local) stop working after your change, you almost certainly edited the LAN/DHCP setting. Move the addresses to the WAN setting instead.

The general procedure

Open the router’s admin interface — typically http://192.168.1.1 or http://192.168.0.1. The address and default credentials are usually printed on a label on the device.
Find the internet or WAN configuration. Manufacturers label this differently: Internet → Connection, Network → WAN, Advanced → Internet.
Look for Use these DNS servers or Manual DNS and switch away from Obtain automatically or Get from ISP.
Enter the primary and secondary addresses from the resolver comparison. Enter IPv6 servers as well if your connection uses IPv6 — otherwise IPv6-capable devices will keep using the ISP’s resolver for a share of their lookups and the change will only half apply.
Save and let the router apply the change. Many reboot at this point.
On a client device, disconnect and reconnect so it picks up the new configuration.

Some routers make this harder

ISP-supplied routers often grey out the DNS fields entirely. If so, configure DNS on individual devices instead, or put the ISP unit into bridge mode and use your own router — a bigger change than it sounds.
Some routers force their own DNS for parental controls or security features. Those features must be turned off before a manual setting takes effect.
Mesh systems frequently move this into a phone app rather than a web interface, usually under advanced or internet settings.

Check it worked

On any connected device:

# Windows
ipconfig /flushdns
nslookup dnsbenchmarkpro.com

# macOS / Linux
dig dnsbenchmarkpro.com +short

The server that answers will usually be your router’s own address, because the router is forwarding on the devices’ behalf — that is expected and does not mean the change failed. Confirm success by checking that browsing works normally and that anything on your local network still resolves by name.

Then walk the network: a smart TV, a games console, a printer, and anything that authenticates against a local server. Router-level changes surface problems on the devices you interact with least often.

Reverting

Return to the same page and set DNS back to Obtain automatically / Get from ISP, or re-enter the values you recorded before you started.
Save and reboot the router.
Reconnect each device, or clear its DNS cache, so it stops using the previous answers.
If you can no longer reach the admin interface at all, a factory reset (usually a recessed button held for around ten seconds) restores defaults — but it also erases your Wi-Fi name and password, so treat it as the last option.

Last reviewed 2026-08-15. Provider configuration comes from RESOLVER-REGISTRY.json, which records the official source and verification date for every entry.