A lot of people have started using VPNs with Twitch – both streamers and regular users. It’s easy to see why. Using a VPN when streaming Twitch will let you avoid ISP throttling and help you bypass geo-blocks. What’s more, Twitch VPNs protect you against DDoS attacks, doxxing, swatting, and more.
But there is one problem – VPNs slow down online speeds. For some of you, the slowdown might be so noticeable that it makes using Twitch unbearable.
Well, if you’re in that situation, don’t worry. We’ll do our best to offer you some actionable tips that should help you speed up your Twitch VPN speeds. Besides that, we’ll also answer some FAQs.
How Much Do VPNs Slow Down Your Twitch Speeds?
We can’t give you a clear answer, unfortunately. Slowdowns vary from person to person, and they’re 100% reliant on your original ISP speeds. As a general rule of thumb, if your original ISP speeds are slow, your VPN speeds will be slow too.
Still, we ran some tests using Twitch to see what the average slowdown is. For reference, our original ISP speeds are around 100 Mbps. We used over ten different VPNs that we found at vpncheck.org with Twitch alongside the Ookla Speedtest tool. On average, we experienced anywhere between 20% and 50% slowdowns. We had the fastest Twitch speeds with ExpressVPN, NordVPN, and Surfshark.
Why Do VPNs Slow Down Your Twitch Speeds?
It’s because the VPN sends your traffic through another stop before it reaches Twitch’s servers – the VPN server. That extra hop in your connection will cause a slowdown.
That’s not all. VPN encryption also plays an important part. It secures your traffic, which is nice. But by doing that, it also makes your data heavier. And that means it takes longer for it to arrive at its destination (Twitch’s servers).
What’s more, if you use Twitch via a VPN server that’s very far from you, that will slow down your speeds too. If the distance is too big (like if the VPN server is on a different continent), your data packets will take much longer to travel between the VPN server and the VPN app on your device.
Finally, the VPN server network plays a role too. If the VPN provider doesn’t have enough servers, they’ll get overloaded fast. That means too many people will use the same servers, which will lead to overcrowding. In turn, that leads to all VPN users having slow speeds.
How to Optimize Twitch VPN Speeds
We tested most of these tips ourselves and can confirm they always offered us faster speeds. And here’s the good news – they’re not complicated at all!
1. Use Servers Close to Your Location
If you only connect to far-away servers, you’ll only have slow VPN speeds. So, if possible, try connecting to servers close to your country. If you can use VPN servers in your own country, that’s even better.
In our tests, we experienced 20-30% speed boosts whenever we used VPN servers in neighboring countries instead of VPN servers on other continents.
If you use a VPN that has over 1,000 servers in over 50 countries, finding a nearby server should be easy.
2. Connect to a Server That’s Not Overloaded
If the server load is over 80% or 90%, your speeds will definitely suffer. Most top VPNs display the server load inside the app (it’s usually a percentage next to the server). The lower the load, the better the speeds.
Unfortunately, not all VPN providers show you the server load. Some of them show you the ping at least (how long it takes for your device to communicate with the VPN server), which is also helpful. You need to connect to servers that have low ping.
3. If Split-Tunneling Is Available, Use It
Split-tunneling is a VPN feature that lets you decide how your Internet traffic is routed. You can pick which traffic goes through the VPN server and which traffic goes through your ISP’s network.
For example, you can use split-tunneling to only send Twitch traffic through the VPN. All other Internet traffic (torrent client, Steam, Skype, etc.) will go through your ISP’s network.
That helps you get better VPN speeds because there will be less data to encrypt and decrypt. And even if you use a far-away server, there’s less data to exchange with it, so it should travel faster.
3. Don’t Stream Twitch Using OpenVPN
OpenVPN is a very popular VPN protocol because it’s open-source and offers powerful security. Unfortunately, it doesn’t offer good speeds. That’s because it has a lot of lines of code – anywhere between 70,000 and 600,000.
And that’s not all. OpenVPN is also single-threaded. That means it can only use one CPU core – yes, even if you have an eight-core CPU. Even worse, it uses the CPU core that your operating system uses. So it will take even longer for it to encrypt and decrypt data.
Instead of OpenVPN, you should use faster and more lightweight VPN protocols. The best alternative is WireGuard – a secure open-source protocol that’s much faster than OpenVPN. In our tests, it was around 60-70% faster.
Other fast protocols that you can use include IKEv2/IPSec and L2TP/IPSec. PPTP is also extremely fast, but you shouldn’t use it. Its encryption is very weak – the NSA can actually crack it!
4. Ditch WiFi for a Wired Connection
WiFi can slow down your Twitch VPN speeds if it has a weak signal. And pretty much everybody knows that the WiFi signal will drop a lot if you leave the room where the router is.
If you use wired connections, you get rid of the problematic WiFi signal. Don’t worry – just because you’re using an ethernet cable doesn’t mean you’re stuck sitting right next to the router. You can get long ethernet cables that let you sit in different rooms too.
5. Shut Down Background Apps
If your Internet is slow or your device doesn’t have enough RAM memory, you should keep web-connected apps running in the background. You should only use Twitch and the VPN. There’s no need to leave Steam, Skype, uTorrent, Fortnite, and other apps running.
If you do, they’ll eat up your limited bandwidth, so you’ll get annoyingly slow speeds while using Twitch with a VPN.
Bottom Line
VPNs are very useful tools for Twitch users, but they can slow down your speeds which takes the fun out of using them with Twitch. We did our best to offer speed optimization tips that actually work in this article. But we’d also like to hear other useful tips from you too. So please let us know how else you boost Twitch VPN speeds in the comments.