CheckMyBits

Ping Test – Test Your Ping, Latency and Jitter Online

Measure your round-trip latency and jitter in about four seconds. Jitter is the number most people ignore and the one that actually causes rubber-banding, so this test reports both. It works as a quick latency test or lag test from any browser, with nothing to install.

Runs in your browser. Nothing is recorded or uploaded.

How to check your ping online

  1. Stop anything that is downloading, and pause streaming on other devices in the house. Both skew the result badly.
  2. If you use a VPN, turn it off first. It always adds latency, and you want to know your baseline.
  3. Press Start ping test and wait about four seconds.
  4. Read the jitter figure, not just the ping. A steady 60 ms beats an erratic 30 ms for anything live.
  5. Run it again on a cable instead of Wi-Fi and compare. That comparison is usually the whole answer.

What the results mean

High ping or jitter? Fix it

Start here — the three that fix most cases
  1. Use an Ethernet cable. Reliably the single biggest improvement available. Wi-Fi is a shared radio medium with retries built in, which adds both latency and a great deal of jitter. A cable often halves the ping and cuts jitter by far more.
  2. Check nothing else is using the connection. A console updating in another room, a cloud backup, or someone streaming will all show up here. Test again with them stopped.
  3. Turn off your VPN. It always adds latency. A nearby server might cost 5–15 ms; a distant one can add hundreds.
Wi-Fi specifically
  1. Move closer to the router, or move the router. Walls, especially brick and anything with foil insulation, cost far more than people expect.
  2. Use the 5 GHz band rather than 2.4 GHz. It is shorter-range but dramatically less congested, and 2.4 GHz shares space with microwaves, baby monitors and Bluetooth.
  3. Change the Wi-Fi channel in your router settings. In a block of flats you are probably sharing a channel with a dozen neighbours.
  4. Keep the router away from other 2.4 GHz devices, and off the floor.
  5. If you use powerline adapters, test without them. They are convenient and often add significant jitter.
Bufferbloat — fine when idle, terrible when downloading
  1. Confirm it. Run this test while idle, then start a large download and run it again. If the second result is several times worse, that is bufferbloat: your router is holding too much data in its queue.
  2. Enable SQM or Smart Queue Management in your router if it offers one. It trades a little peak download speed for a very large improvement in latency under load.
  3. Failing that, look for QoS settings and prioritise gaming traffic or your own device.
  4. Some ISP-supplied routers have none of these. A router that supports SQM is the cheapest meaningful fix for a household that games while others stream.
Windows and macOS
  1. Windows: check Settings → Windows Update → Advanced → Delivery Optimization and turn off uploading to other PCs, which runs silently in the background.
  2. Windows: open Task Manager → Performance → Ethernet or Wi-Fi and see whether anything is using the connection while you are idle.
  3. macOS: Activity Monitor → Network shows the same thing, sorted by bytes sent and received.
  4. Pause iCloud, OneDrive, Dropbox and Steam downloads before a game rather than during one.
  5. On a laptop, check the power plan is not set to a mode that puts the network adapter to sleep.
When it is not your connection
  1. Compare this result with your game's own ping display. If this page reads 15 ms and the game reads 180 ms, your connection is healthy and the game server is simply far away.
  2. Change the game's server region if it allows it. Playing on a server in your own country is worth more than any router setting.
  3. If both numbers are high, test at a different time of day. Evening congestion on some connections is real and is your ISP's problem, not yours.
  4. If the problem is constant and wired, report it to your ISP with these numbers. A specific complaint about latency and jitter gets further than "the internet is slow".

Frequently asked questions

How do I check my ping?
Run the test and wait a few seconds. It reports your round-trip ping and jitter, so you can see both how fast and how steady your connection is.
Is this a latency test or a lag test?
It measures latency, the round-trip time, and jitter, which are the network causes of lag. It does not see packet loss or how busy a game server is. The questions below cover both.
Is this a real ping?
Not in the strict sense, and it is worth being clear about that. A real ping sends an ICMP packet, and browsers have no way to do that — there is no API for raw sockets, deliberately. This measures the round trip of an HTTP request instead. On a warm connection that is very close to network latency, but it includes a small amount of HTTP overhead, so expect it to read a few milliseconds above what the ping command in a terminal would show. The jitter figure is unaffected by that offset, which is part of why jitter is the more reliable number here.
What is jitter, and why does it matter more than ping?
Jitter is how much your latency varies from moment to moment. A steady 60 ms is far more playable than one that swings between 20 ms and 120 ms, because games and calls can compensate for consistent delay but not for unpredictable delay. That is what causes rubber-banding, where your character snaps backwards, and the choppy audio on a call where the ping looks fine. Under 5 ms is good, over 20 ms causes visible problems.
Why does the test not show packet loss?
Because it cannot measure it honestly. TCP, which carries web traffic, retransmits lost packets automatically and invisibly, so a browser never sees loss — it sees a delay instead. Any site showing you a packet loss percentage from inside a browser is estimating. What loss actually looks like here is a sudden spike in the graph: one sample far above the others. Repeated spikes mean packets are going missing even though the average looks fine.
My ping to this page is low but my game still lags.
That is a useful result, not a contradiction. This measures the distance to the nearest Cloudflare server, which is typically in your own city. Your game server might be in another country. If this reads 15 ms and your game reads 180 ms, your connection is healthy and the problem is server distance — change the game's server region if it lets you. If both are high, the problem is your own connection.
What is a good ping?
Under 20 ms is excellent and about as good as consumer connections get. Under 50 ms is comfortable for any game. Between 50 and 100 ms is playable but noticeable in fast shooters. Above 100 ms is a real handicap in competitive play, though it is perfectly fine for video, browsing and most calls. Fibre typically delivers 5–20 ms, cable 15–40 ms, 5G 25–60 ms, and satellite 40–600 ms depending on which system.
Why is my ping worse on Wi-Fi than on a cable?
Because Wi-Fi is a shared radio medium with retries built in. Every device on the network takes turns, interference causes retransmission, and the result is both higher latency and far more jitter. Moving from Wi-Fi to an Ethernet cable is reliably the single biggest improvement available to most people — often halving the ping and cutting jitter by much more. Test both and compare.
What is bufferbloat?
A router holding too much data in its queue. The symptom is distinctive: ping is fine when the connection is idle, and climbs dramatically the moment anything downloads. Run this test once while idle and again while a large download runs — if the second result is several times worse, that is bufferbloat. The fix is enabling SQM or Smart Queue Management in your router, if it offers one, which trades a little peak speed for a very large improvement in latency under load.
Does a VPN increase ping?
Always, by some amount, because your traffic takes a longer path through an extra server. A nearby VPN server might add only 5–15 ms; one on another continent can add hundreds. If you are testing a gaming problem, turn the VPN off and test again before changing anything else.

Fix-it steps last checked against current operating system releases on 18 October 2026.