Connection is slow

Any VPN adds some overhead. Your traffic has to be encrypted, sent to a relay server, and decrypted on the way back, which costs both bandwidth and a little latency. Usually that is small enough not to notice. If you’re seeing a large slowdown, work through the steps below.

What’s normal and what isn’t

A healthy connection to a nearby location should feel about the same as no VPN for browsing, email, video calls, and standard streaming. The clearest sign that something is wrong is a slowdown you can feel: pages that crawl, video that will not hold quality, calls that break up.

Two things are expected rather than faults:

• Free accounts are speed-limited. The limit is applied on our servers, not in your browser, so no amount of local troubleshooting will lift it. This is the main difference between Free and Premium.
• Distant locations are slower. Round-trip time to the other side of the world dominates everything else, and no VPN can shorten the physical distance.

If neither applies and the connection still feels slow, keep reading.

Step 1: Check your raw speed first

You need a baseline before you can say the VPN is the problem.

1. Disconnect WorkingVPN.
2. Run a speed test at fast.com or any similar site.
3. Note the number.
4. Reconnect WorkingVPN and run the same test.
5. Compare.

If your raw speed is already slow, the VPN isn’t the cause. Fix your Wi-Fi or ISP first.

Step 2: Pick a nearby location

• If you want privacy rather than access to another country’s content, pick the closest location to you.
• If you’re connecting to a specific country on purpose, expect it to be slower the farther away it is. That is physics, not a fault.

Step 3: Try a neighbouring country

WorkingVPN offers one location per country, so there is no second server to switch to within the same country. What you can do is try a nearby one: if Germany is slow, try Netherlands, France, Switzerland, or Austria. Any individual location can be busy at a given moment while its neighbours are not.

Step 4: Close bandwidth-hungry apps

Background apps compete for the same connection:

• Cloud sync clients (Dropbox, iCloud, OneDrive, Google Drive)
• Video meetings (Zoom, Teams, Meet)
• Backup tools
• Large downloads in other tabs

Quit what you don’t need and test again.

Step 5: Check your Wi-Fi signal

A weak Wi-Fi signal caps your speed regardless of the VPN. If you’re far from the router, or on 2.4 GHz on a crowded network, that is probably your bottleneck.

• Move closer to the router.
• Switch to 5 GHz if it’s available.
• Use wired Ethernet for anything latency-sensitive.

Step 6: Disable conflicting extensions

Other extensions can slow down every request your browser makes, especially ad blockers with large filter lists, other VPN or proxy extensions, and anti-tracking tools. Disable them temporarily and see whether speed improves.

When to accept the slowdown

Some of it is unavoidable:

• Connecting to a far-away country, where round-trip time dominates
• Using a free account, which is speed-limited by design
• Peak hours on a popular location
• Heavily filtered corporate networks, which add overhead of their own

In those cases, the best you can do is pick the nearest location that works.

Still too slow?

If none of the above helps and you’re on Premium, email [email protected] with:

• Your speed without the VPN
• Your speed with the VPN connected
• Which country you were connecting to
• Roughly where you are

On a free account, upgrading to Premium removes the speed limit.