How To Forget A Wi-Fi Network On Mac

Learn how to forget a network on Mac in this easy-to-follow guide.

Andrew Kirkcaldy

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Last Updated on May 15, 2023

Wi-Fi is an incredible tool that helps us every day of our lives – but we all know the sense of frustration that can occur when things go wrong!

Whether the Wi-Fi on your Mac won’t stay connected, keeps dropping out, or just pretends it has never met your laptop, forgetting a network can be a great way to reset things and start again – hopefully with better results!

To help, we have everything you need to know about how to forget a network on your Mac, and hopefully save you from your Wi-Fi woes!

Why Do You Need To Forget A Network?

Before we take a closer look at the best ways to forget a network, you may be wondering why this is necessary. We have touched upon this briefly, but it is worth taking the time for a closer look below.

Networks are simply a collection of devices that use Wi-Fi in order to communicate with each other. They’re often used to access resources such as internet services, files, printers, etc., so if something goes wrong with them, you may want to get rid of them.

You’ve probably experienced this before: Your Wi-Fi connection drops out intermittently, so after a while, you just decide to connect manually.

This works fine for a bit until you notice your computer isn’t connecting to the network anymore, forcing you to manually reconnect every time you try to load something up.

The same thing happens to you when you walk outside without any Wi-Fi around, only to find yourself back home later on…

Forgetting a network is one solution here; another would be to set up your Mac’s Wi-Fi to not automatically join networks.

It is possible to do this, but unfortunately, there is no easy way to configure your Mac for this kind of behavior. If setting it up was too much work, though, then following these steps will turn it into automatic mode ASAP.

How To Forget A Network On Your Mac

Now that we have taken a closer look at the importance and value that can come from forgetting a network, you may be wondering just how to go about this.

In most cases, the process of forgetting Wi-Fi Networks is fairly straightforward, allowing you to ditch a wireless network from your system without too much effort.

Start by opting to Select Wi-Fi on your laptop – the option for this will be located in the top-right corner of the top menu bar and will be recognized by the Wi-Fi icon.

Once you have located the icon, click this, and select “Open Network Preferences…” Then, select the Advanced Button to head to the next screen.

You will be presented with a list of saved Wi-Fi networks, allowing you to select the one that you wish to remove. Scroll down your list of saved Wi-Fi networks until you discover the one you would like to forget, and then click on this.

You can also opt to forget more than one Wi-Fi network, and this can be achieved by pressing the “Command” key at the same time as you click the networks.

Once you have selected the network, or networks, that you would like to forget, you can click the minus sign (-) located in the bottom left corner of the network list, and click “Ok”.

You can then click “Apply” to complete the action, and remove any unwanted networks from your Mac, making it much easier to connect to the Wi-Fi as and when you need to.

Another reason that it is important to remove those networks is that they take up valuable wireless bandwidth, which is shared amongst devices.

Since Wi-Fi uses wireless technology to transfer data, that means that having multiple devices connected to the same network can really slow down network speed and cause disconnection issues.

So remember to take care of this whenever needed – forgetting a network can be a great way to “reboot” your system and give it a new lease of life.

Final Thoughts

The next time you’re stuck with poor connectivity, or you are experiencing problems like intermittent connections, forget all about resetting the entire networking stack – you can forget a network! Use this clever little trick to reboot your network, and make things perfect right away.

We hope this article has been able to help you get rid of bad network habits and improve your overall experience as a user.