Make Your Macbook Connect Automatically to Your Home Wifi Again

Macbook wireless wifi settings
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If you are wondering “Why won’t my Macbook Air connect to my home wifi network anymore?” or “How come my Macbook stopped connecting automatically to my wireless network?”, like many other people, here are a couple of things you can try to fix it.

A lot of people have noticed with recent OS X versions that either their Macbook no longer automatically connects to their home wireless network, or that their Macbook or Macbook Air takes a really long time to reconnect to wifi after it wakes up, or both.

The first thing to do, especially if your Macbook or Macbook Air no longer automatically connects to your home wifi network, is to make sure that a) your computer is set up to automatically join networks to which it has previously connected (see below), and b) that your home network is listed in your ‘preferred networks’ list.

Go to your Macbook’s System Preferences, to the Network settings, and then click on “Advanced”.

mac network icon

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macbook wifi automatically connect

Notice that even your Macbook says that the way that it should work is that “Known networks will be joined automatically,” and this is true whether you have “Ask to join new networks” checked or not (if not checked, it won’t even ask, you will have to manually add new networks).

The advanced settings for your wireless is where you will often find the root cause of your problem.

The first thing to check is to be sure that “Remember networks that this computer has joined” is checked (this is the setting referred to above, that makes sure that your computer will automatically connect to known networks).

Macbook wireless wifi settings

As you can see, our example network, Bene Gesserit, is listed, and it is also correctly isted as being protected WPA/WPA2 Personal security (and so is password protected).

Some things that could be causing your Macbook to not connect to your home wifi

  • You changed your password, but for some reason it did not ‘take’, and so the password was not updated in your settings.
  • You set your network to “no password” at some point, and that was saved in your settings, so that now when your Macbook tries to connect with a password, it doesn’t work.
  • Your home network is listed, but with the wrong security settings.
  • Your home network is not listed at all.

To remedy any of these situations, the easiest thing to do is to simply delete your home network from the list (by highlighting your home network, then clicking the “-” button).

mac network delete button

Once you have deleted your home network from your list of known networks, turn your wifi off and back on.

turn mac wifi off

Your home wireless network should appear in your list of available wireless networks, and once you connect, it will be re-added to your list of known networks, and should automatically connect.

One note: for some reason, for some people, turning off Bluetooth on their Macbook has helped, particularly with the “slow connecting upon waking up” issue. We have not had this problem, but we can imagine that it may be related to this:

Looking again at your network settings, look at the list of connections, and make sure that your Bluetooth connection is listed below your Wi-Fi connection. If your Bluetooth connection (which in this context is used for Bluetooth tethering of your Macbook to the Internet) is listed first (or at any rate above your Wi-Fi connection), delete the Bluetooth connection, and then if you really need to tether via Bluetooth, set the connection up again (it will then be below your wifi connection).

list of Macbook connections

These steps should help the vast majority of home network connection problems with your Macbook. Of course, if all else fails, a trip to the Genius Bar will probably get it sorted out.

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