You lower ping mostly by fixing what's on your side of the connection: your Wi-Fi, your router, which game server you're on. Do that before you touch a VPN at all. A VPN can lower your ping when your internet provider's route to the game server is the actual problem, and it can add some latency when it isn't. The fixes below start with the highest-impact changes and end with how to tell which case you're in.

None of this requires new hardware. Most of it takes five minutes and a restart.

What is ping, and why does it spike?

Ping is the time it takes a signal to travel from your device to a server and back, measured in milliseconds. A 30 ms ping means a round trip takes 30 thousandths of a second. Lower is faster. A low number means the game registers your inputs sooner.

Three related terms get mixed together a lot, so it's worth separating them.

A ping spike is usually one of these three showing up: a slower route, a moment of instability, or a dropped packet forcing a retry. The fixes below deal with the causes behind all three.

Why is your ping high in the first place?

A few things determine your baseline ping, and only one of them is distance.

Start with physical distance. Data in fiber-optic cable travels at roughly two-thirds the speed of light, which works out to about 124 miles of round-trip distance per millisecond. That's a rough floor for how low your ping can ever go to a given server, no matter what you fix:

If your ping to a server is already close to that number, you're near the physical limit and no setting change will get you meaningfully lower. You'd need a closer server instead.

Your ISP's route matters too. Your provider doesn't always send your traffic the shortest way. Two ISPs "peer," meaning they hand traffic to each other, at specific points, and a badly peered or congested handoff can add real delay on top of the physical distance, even for a nearby server.

So does congestion on your own network. A household download, a console update, or a roommate's video call competing for the same connection adds queuing delay to everything else, including your game.

DNS lookup delay plays a small part as well. Before your device can even reach a server, it has to resolve that server's address through a DNS lookup. A slow or distant DNS resolver adds a small delay to that first connection. VPN Super's Best DNS Servers for Gaming guide covers picking a faster one if you haven't compared providers before. It's a one-time setting, not something to dig into here.

And there's ISP traffic shaping, which gets its own explanation in fix 10 below.

Most of that is fixable on your side. The one case where a VPN genuinely helps is when your ISP's route itself is the slow part, and the only way to know is to test it (see "Does a VPN lower ping?" below).

How do you test your ping the right way?

The basic tools are quick. Most games show a ping number in the server browser or scoreboard, a speed-test site will give you a general number, and you can run the ping command from a terminal (ping 8.8.8.8, for example, as a generic reference point).

What those tools don't tell you is where the delay is coming from. A traceroute does. It shows every network hop your data passes through on the way to a destination, with the latency at each one.

On Windows, open Command Prompt and run:

tracert gameserver.example.com

On Mac, open Terminal and run:

traceroute gameserver.example.com

Replace the address with your game's actual server, or a general site, if you just want to see how your route looks.

Reading the output mostly means spotting where the number jumps. Here's a worked example:

In this example, hops 1 through 4 look fine. The problem, if there is one, is that jump at hop 5. A plain ping test never tells you that; it just gives you the final number, not where the delay was added.

12 fixes that actually lower your ping

Work through these roughly in order. The first few handle most cases. The later ones are for when the basics are already covered and the number is still high.

1. Connect with an Ethernet cable instead of Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi adds variable delay from interference, distance to the router, and other devices sharing the signal. A wired connection removes all of that. If your setup can't run a cable, at least move closer to the router and switch to the 5 GHz band if your router offers one.
2. Restart your router, and your PC or console while you're at it. Routers accumulate small memory and connection-table issues over days or weeks of uptime that show up as creeping latency. A restart clears them. Do this before anything more involved.
3. Close background downloads, updates, and streams. A game console patching in the background, a laptop syncing cloud storage, or someone else on the network streaming video all compete for the same connection and add queuing delay to your game traffic. Pause them before you play, not after you notice lag.
4. Update your router's firmware and your game client. Outdated router firmware occasionally ships with networking bugs that get fixed in later updates. The same goes for game clients: a patch sometimes specifically addresses netcode or matchmaking-region issues.
5. Pick the closest server manually instead of trusting auto-match. Many games' automatic matchmaking optimizes for finding a match quickly, not for the lowest ping. If the game lets you filter or select a region, choose the one closest to you and compare.
6. Play during off-peak hours when you have a choice. Evenings and weekends put more load on shared infrastructure: your neighborhood's local network segment, your ISP's regional links, sometimes the game's own servers. Early afternoons or weekday mornings tend to show noticeably better numbers on a congested connection.
7. Check your DNS resolver. If your ISP's default DNS is slow, connections take an extra beat to start. This is a one-time setting change; see the DNS section above for where to compare providers.
8. Rule out your local network by testing on a different connection. Tether your phone's mobile data for a quick test. If your ping is dramatically better on mobile data than on your home Wi-Fi, the problem is local: your router, your ISP, or interference, not the game or the destination server.
9. Run a traceroute to find where the delay actually is. Use the walkthrough above. If the jump happens at your own router, that's a local fix. If it happens several hops in, it's your ISP's route, which points you toward fix 12.
10. See whether your ISP is throttling gaming traffic. Most competitive games send data over UDP, a type of traffic that some ISPs' traffic-shaping rules can deprioritize when the network is busy. If your ping spikes specifically during evenings and weekends but tests clean at 3 a.m., that pattern, not your hardware, is usually the tell. There's no setting on your end that fixes this directly. The next fix covers what can help.
11. Look at background traffic that's eating bandwidth without you noticing. Automatic cloud backups and smart-home devices polling constantly aren't usually the biggest factor, but on a modest connection they add up.
12. Connect through a low-latency VPN server if the problem is your ISP's route. If you've worked through fixes 1 through 11 and your ping is still high on certain servers or during specific hours, the bottleneck may be your ISP's routing rather than your setup. Open VPN Super, sort the server list by current latency instead of picking by name or map distance, and connect to the lowest-latency nearby option. On Windows, the app automatically selects between OpenVPN and WireGuard for you. WireGuard in particular is built to be ideal for streaming and gaming, so protocol isn't something you need to pick manually. The next section walks through testing whether this actually helped in your case.

Does a VPN lower ping?

Sometimes, and it depends entirely on why your ping is high in the first place. A VPN reroutes your traffic through its own network. If your ISP's normal path to the game server is inefficient or congested, that reroute can be shorter or better-peered, and your ping goes down. If your ISP's normal path is already direct and well-connected, adding a VPN server as an extra hop adds a small amount of latency instead, from the encryption step and the detour through that server. VPN Super doesn't publish a fixed number for that increase because it depends on your own connection and the server you pick; the test below tells you your actual result.

Here's how those cases break down in practice.

Rather than guess which one describes you, test it directly.

1. Run a baseline ping test to your game, or a general test site, and write the number down.
2. Open VPN Super and sort the server list by current latency.
3. Connect to the lowest-latency nearby option, not necessarily the one closest to you on a map.
4. Run the exact same ping test again.
5. Compare the two numbers. If it dropped, your ISP's default route was the bottleneck; keep the VPN on for gaming. If it went up, your direct connection was already the better path; turn the VPN off for gaming and use it elsewhere.

What's a good ping for gaming?

It depends on the genre, because different games have different input-timing windows.

These are typical competitive-play tolerance ranges based on how each genre's input windows work, not hard technical cutoffs. You can play an MMO comfortably at 200 ms; that same number in a competitive shooter is a real handicap.

How should you set up VPN Super for the lowest ping?