There's a laminated card that's lived on our fridge for years now with the wifi password on it, and every time we've changed internet providers or reset the router, that card gets updated and someone inevitably still tries to type the old password from memory a week later. Tony's the worst offender here, mostly because he learned the original password back when it was something simple enough to actually remember, and every "more secure" replacement since has been a string of characters that means giving up on memorising it entirely and just relying on the card.
That's actually the right call, and it took us longer than it should have to admit it. The passwords people can easily remember are, almost without exception, the same ones that are easiest for someone else to guess or crack, birthdays, pet names, the street you grew up on, a word followed by a number and an exclamation mark because some form once demanded "one number and one special character." None of that holds up against modern password-cracking tools, which chew through those predictable patterns in a fraction of the time it takes a long, genuinely random string.
We use the password generator at https://freeonlinetools.au/tools/password-generator.php now for anything that matters, the router admin login, the wifi password itself, email accounts, anything financial. It spits out a proper random string of whatever length and character mix you set it to, and the honest truth is nobody's expected to remember these. That's not a failure of the system, that's the whole point. A password manager or, for something like home wifi, a card on the fridge, does the remembering so the password itself can be genuinely hard to guess rather than a compromise between security and what a human brain can hold onto.
For the router and modem admin login specifically, we treat that with even more care than the wifi password itself, because whoever controls the router controls everything on the network, every device, every camera, every smart plug in the house. The factory default admin password on plenty of routers is something embarrassingly guessable, printed right there on a sticker on the unit, and plenty of people never change it because they never needed to log into the router settings after the initial setup. That's worth fixing on any router in the house, generated fresh rather than left as whatever the ISP shipped it with.
Now, the actual problem a random long password creates is that typing "Xk9$mP2vL#nQ7wRt" into a phone's wifi settings, thumb-typing on a tiny keyboard while a visitor stands there waiting, is genuinely painful, and it's exactly the situation that makes people quietly go back to a weaker, easier-to-type password out of frustration. This is where the QR code generator at https://freeonlinetools.au/tools/qr-code-generator.php earns its keep. Most phones these days scan a wifi QR code straight from the camera app and connect automatically, no typing required, and no reading a password off a laminated card character by character while someone waits.
Setting this up is genuinely quick. Generate the QR code with the wifi network name and the actual password encoded into it, print it small enough to fit next to the router or on the same fridge card the password used to live on alone, and from then on connecting a new phone, a visiting relative's tablet, or a smart device that supports QR wifi setup is a five-second scan rather than a spelling-it-out exercise. We did this for the whole house and it's genuinely changed how often people just connect without asking for help, which is a small thing but adds up when there's regularly family coming and going.
Worth a mention that the same QR trick is handy well beyond wifi. We've used the same generator for putting a car's rego and compliance details on a card in the glovebox as a quick reference, linking to instruction manuals for gear that's been sold secondhand and no longer comes with a physical manual, and putting a scan-to-call number on a for-sale sign stuck to something in the front yard so people don't need to type a phone number in while standing on the footpath. Once you start using QR codes for the boring admin bits of life, you notice how many small frictions they quietly remove.
Guest access is worth setting up separately if your router supports it, which most from the last several years do. Rather than handing visiting relatives or their kids the same password that every smart plug, camera and laptop in the house relies on, a separate guest network with its own generated password (and its own QR code stuck near the router) keeps visitor devices off the main network entirely. It's a five-minute setup once and it means a mate's phone that's picked up something dodgy on public wifi somewhere else isn't sitting on the same network as the security cameras or the NAS drive with family photos on it.
Smart devices around the house deserve the same treatment as the router, and this is the bit that gets skipped most often. Smart plugs, cameras, the odd robot vacuum, a smart TV, plenty ship with a default password or, worse, no password at all until you set one during setup, and it's easy to click through that step quickly just to get the thing working. Generating a proper password for each of these during setup, rather than reusing the wifi password everywhere out of convenience, means one compromised device doesn't hand over the keys to everything else on the network as well.
The last habit worth mentioning is actually changing these passwords occasionally rather than setting once and forgetting for a decade, particularly the router admin login and the wifi password if you've had a lot of visitors, tradespeople, or short-term guests with access to it over the years. Generate a new one, update the card, regenerate the QR code, and move on, the whole process takes less time than it took to read this, and it's a lot cheaper than dealing with someone freeloading on the connection or, worse, poking around a router that was never properly secured in the first place.
That's actually the right call, and it took us longer than it should have to admit it. The passwords people can easily remember are, almost without exception, the same ones that are easiest for someone else to guess or crack, birthdays, pet names, the street you grew up on, a word followed by a number and an exclamation mark because some form once demanded "one number and one special character." None of that holds up against modern password-cracking tools, which chew through those predictable patterns in a fraction of the time it takes a long, genuinely random string.
We use the password generator at https://freeonlinetools.au/tools/password-generator.php now for anything that matters, the router admin login, the wifi password itself, email accounts, anything financial. It spits out a proper random string of whatever length and character mix you set it to, and the honest truth is nobody's expected to remember these. That's not a failure of the system, that's the whole point. A password manager or, for something like home wifi, a card on the fridge, does the remembering so the password itself can be genuinely hard to guess rather than a compromise between security and what a human brain can hold onto.
For the router and modem admin login specifically, we treat that with even more care than the wifi password itself, because whoever controls the router controls everything on the network, every device, every camera, every smart plug in the house. The factory default admin password on plenty of routers is something embarrassingly guessable, printed right there on a sticker on the unit, and plenty of people never change it because they never needed to log into the router settings after the initial setup. That's worth fixing on any router in the house, generated fresh rather than left as whatever the ISP shipped it with.
Now, the actual problem a random long password creates is that typing "Xk9$mP2vL#nQ7wRt" into a phone's wifi settings, thumb-typing on a tiny keyboard while a visitor stands there waiting, is genuinely painful, and it's exactly the situation that makes people quietly go back to a weaker, easier-to-type password out of frustration. This is where the QR code generator at https://freeonlinetools.au/tools/qr-code-generator.php earns its keep. Most phones these days scan a wifi QR code straight from the camera app and connect automatically, no typing required, and no reading a password off a laminated card character by character while someone waits.
Setting this up is genuinely quick. Generate the QR code with the wifi network name and the actual password encoded into it, print it small enough to fit next to the router or on the same fridge card the password used to live on alone, and from then on connecting a new phone, a visiting relative's tablet, or a smart device that supports QR wifi setup is a five-second scan rather than a spelling-it-out exercise. We did this for the whole house and it's genuinely changed how often people just connect without asking for help, which is a small thing but adds up when there's regularly family coming and going.
Worth a mention that the same QR trick is handy well beyond wifi. We've used the same generator for putting a car's rego and compliance details on a card in the glovebox as a quick reference, linking to instruction manuals for gear that's been sold secondhand and no longer comes with a physical manual, and putting a scan-to-call number on a for-sale sign stuck to something in the front yard so people don't need to type a phone number in while standing on the footpath. Once you start using QR codes for the boring admin bits of life, you notice how many small frictions they quietly remove.
Guest access is worth setting up separately if your router supports it, which most from the last several years do. Rather than handing visiting relatives or their kids the same password that every smart plug, camera and laptop in the house relies on, a separate guest network with its own generated password (and its own QR code stuck near the router) keeps visitor devices off the main network entirely. It's a five-minute setup once and it means a mate's phone that's picked up something dodgy on public wifi somewhere else isn't sitting on the same network as the security cameras or the NAS drive with family photos on it.
Smart devices around the house deserve the same treatment as the router, and this is the bit that gets skipped most often. Smart plugs, cameras, the odd robot vacuum, a smart TV, plenty ship with a default password or, worse, no password at all until you set one during setup, and it's easy to click through that step quickly just to get the thing working. Generating a proper password for each of these during setup, rather than reusing the wifi password everywhere out of convenience, means one compromised device doesn't hand over the keys to everything else on the network as well.
The last habit worth mentioning is actually changing these passwords occasionally rather than setting once and forgetting for a decade, particularly the router admin login and the wifi password if you've had a lot of visitors, tradespeople, or short-term guests with access to it over the years. Generate a new one, update the card, regenerate the QR code, and move on, the whole process takes less time than it took to read this, and it's a lot cheaper than dealing with someone freeloading on the connection or, worse, poking around a router that was never properly secured in the first place.
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