How To Hide or Unhide Wi-Fi Name/SSID

Wi-Fi Logo (Credit: Wikipedia)

Wi-Fi (Wireless Fidelity) has and will forever be a game changer that has made a great positive impact to humanity by having access to the internet anytime anywhere. In a previous blog post article, was about a gadget/device used to access the internet…the Wi-Fi router. This gadget/device, comes along with a lot of things other than its main purpose of accessing the internet which include modifying some of its settings to one’s preference whereby one of those settings include the Wi-Fi name/SSID (Service Set Identifier). Apart from changing Wi-Fi name/SSID (which is by default publicly broadcasted), one can also hide it if they want to which is the main thing in todays blog post article and the step by step guide to achieve that is as follows;

STEP 1 – On your laptop/smartphone (for this case a laptop is used), log in to your router using the default gateway (for this case it is 192.168.0.1) which is also displayed down below the router which displays a login user interface as shown below (for your case it could be different depending on the router you are using);

STEP 2 – While logged in, you will see a menu section on the left side which has different settings one can easily access but for this case, head to the section written “Wireless” whereby you will find a checked box written “Enable SSID Broadcast” as shown below;

TP-Link WR741ND Router Login User Interface (Credit: TP-Link)

STEP 3 – The final thing to do here is just to uncheck the checked “Enable SSID Broadcast” box then you will be prompted to reboot the router for the changes to be saved immediately and that is all, your Wi-Fi name/SSID will not be publicly broadcasted and one will have to input the name/SSID and password for them to access internet.

In conclusion, hiding Wi-Fi name/SSID is sometimes necessary in situations whereby one needs to do so due to their personal reasons but again it is worthy noting that a hidden Wi-Fi name/SSID does not guarantee safety at all because tools are out there on the web that can be used to get any hidden Wi-Fi name/SSID without much effort.

TP-Link WR741ND Router Login User Interface (Credit: TP-Link)