How to Change DNS Settings in Windows 10 and 11

DNS is the thing that turns a name like example.com into the address your computer actually connects to. By default you use whatever server your router hands out, which is almost always your internet provider's. Changing it can be quicker, can get around provider-level blocking, and is the fix for one specific failure that gets misdiagnosed constantly.

First, confirm it really is DNS

Do this first. It takes half a minute, and it will stop you rewriting settings that were never the problem in the first place, which is where most of the wasted time in this topic goes.

Choosing a DNS server

There is no single right answer. Cloudflare is generally fastest, Quad9 blocks known malicious domains as a security measure, and the family variants filter content. Your provider's default is not necessarily worse, and on some networks it is measurably faster because it is physically closer.

Changing DNS through Settings

From the command line

From an elevated prompt, netsh does exactly the same job, and it is much quicker if you are setting up several machines the same way rather than clicking through the same four screens repeatedly.

1. netsh interface show interface lists your adapters and their exact names.
2. netsh interface ip set dns name="Wi-Fi" static 1.1.1.1 sets the primary server.
3. netsh interface ip add dns name="Wi-Fi" 1.0.0.1 index=2 adds the alternate.
4. netsh interface ip set dns name="Wi-Fi" dhcp reverts to whatever the router supplies.

PowerShell is tidier: Set-DnsClientServerAddress -InterfaceAlias "Wi-Fi" -ServerAddresses ("1.1.1.1","1.0.0.1"), and -ResetServerAddresses to undo it.

Flushing the DNS cache

Windows remembers previous lookups, so straight after changing servers you can still be getting answers from the old one, which makes it look like nothing happened. Run ipconfig /flushdns in any Command Prompt. It needs no administrator rights and tells you *Successfully flushed the DNS Resolver Cache*. Do this every time you change DNS, or you will spend ten minutes debugging a cache.

This is also the fix for a site that has moved and is still resolving to its old address, and for a site your machine insists is unreachable when every other device on the network can see it. ipconfig /displaydns shows what is currently cached, which is occasionally illuminating.

The hosts file, which overrides everything

Before Windows asks any DNS server anything, it checks C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts, and an entry in there wins outright no matter what you have configured. This is worth knowing because one stale line produces a genuinely baffling symptom: a single site fails on a single machine while every other device in the house loads it fine. If that is what you are seeing, check this file before you touch anything else.

Open it with Notepad running as administrator. Lines beginning # are comments. Unexpected entries pointing well-known domains at 127.0.0.1 are a common trick of both blocking utilities and malware, and are worth investigating rather than simply deleting.

Encrypted DNS

By default your DNS queries travel in the clear, so anyone sitting between you and the resolver can see which names you look up. Windows 11 can encrypt them: in the same Edit DNS settings panel, set DNS over HTTPS to On (automatic template) after entering a server that supports it, such as Cloudflare or Google.

It is worth being precise about what this achieves. It hides your lookups from the network you are on, including a café's Wi-Fi or your provider. It does not hide them from the resolver you chose, which sees every query by definition. Choosing a resolver is choosing who gets to see that list.