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worth checking if your isp is actually delivering the speeds you're paying for - older devices sometimes get deprioritized on congested networks, and a quick speedtest from a newer phone in the same spot tells you if it's a device problem or a connection problem. if the newer device flies and the older one crawls, then you know the bottleneck is on the device side and the router upgrades others mentioned will help, but if both are slow then your isp might be throttling or the plan itself just isn't great for multiple devices.
Switching to Wi-Fi 5 or 6 routers instead of older Wi-Fi 4 ones makes the biggest difference for older devices, even if the device itself doesn't support the latest standard - backward compatibility still gives you faster speeds overall. Beyond that, closing unnecessary background apps and tabs frees up RAM and bandwidth, and moving closer to the router helps signal strength. If you're on mobile, switching to a different network band (like 2.4GHz instead of 5GHz) sometimes works better depending on your device's age and the distance from your router.
One thing people overlook is that older devices often have weaker Wi-Fi antennas, so placement matters way more than you'd think - moving a router a few feet or getting it off the floor can genuinely speed things up more than buying new gear. Also make sure you're actually checking what's hogging bandwidth (streaming in another room, cloud backups running) because a decade-old phone will feel slow just sitting in the queue behind everything else on your network.
The antenna placement advice is solid, but I'd push back a bit on assuming a new router is always the fix - sometimes the bottleneck is your device's own Wi-Fi chip, which no amount of router upgrades will solve. Before dropping money on new hardware, try clearing out the device's cache and background processes; older machines especially bog down when too many apps are running. Also worth doing a manual DNS change (try 8.8.8.8) in case your ISP's DNS is sluggish, and disable any power-saving features that throttle the Wi-Fi radio - phones and tablets sometimes do this without you realizing.
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