It’s great that our laptops quickly remember familiar networks without having to ask for permission to connect, but sometimes you’ll want to forget a network manually.
If you’re having a hard time with your office or home Wi-Fi, sometimes all you need to do is remove the network from your Wi-Fi settings and re-connect. Here’s a quick guide on how to forget a network on a Mac in three easy steps. In particular, we’ll be using the newest version of MacOS, High Sierra.
Step one: Open Network Preferences
First off, go ahead and mouse up to your Finder bar, then click your Wi-Fi icon. This will open a big long list of all your nearby Wi-Fi networks. From here, click on Open Network Preferences at the bottom of the list.
This is where you’ll find all the advanced settings for your Mac’s networked devices.
Step two: Open Advanced Settings
You can add and remove network adapters here, you can turn Wi-Fi off and on, configure the settings for your individual Wi-Fi networks — whether you want to automatically connect to particular networks, or ask to join new networks. This is also where you can see your network IP address, which can be helpful for diagnosing other network issues. Keep this menu in mind in case forgetting a network doesn’t fix your Wi-Fi woes.
All we’ll be doing here though is clicking on Advanced down at the bottom, and moving on to our final step.
Step three: Remove Network
From here, you’re going to see a lot of options and preference panes you don’t need to worry about. This is the menu you’d use to manually add networks, look into your TCP/IP settings, your network hardware settings, and your Mac’s unique Wi-Fi Address. You can also drag the networks into the order you’d prefer to use, in case you routinely switch between one or more Wi-Fi networks during your day. To do that, just click and drag networks up and down the list, in order of your preferred priority.
The final step is the easiest one: just click the network you want to forget, then click the Minus icon at the bottom of the list. And that’s it, you’re done, your network is forgotten.
Hopefully that should clear up your network issue, try rebooting your Mac and reconnecting to the network if you’re still having trouble. And if you’re still having trouble after that, it might be time to check out one of our other guides, you might have a bigger problem on your hands.
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