What Are Ports?

Think of ports as virtual passages inside your router which control traffic moving between your computer and the Internet. Only specific ports are kept open at all times, ensuring you don’t get any unwanted or harmful traffic piling up on your computer. Certain ports have fixed roles, such as delivering website data to your computers (ports 80 and 443), in most cases. Others, meanwhile, are kept free and can be used by other applications (whose developers assign ports for these apps to run on). You can find a full list of router ports and what they’re assigned to here.

First, Set Up a Static IP Address

In order for port forwarding to work, you’ll need to set a static internal IP address (ipv4) for your device. By default, your ipv4 address is probably dynamic, which means it’s always changing, so the port forwarding won’t be able to pin down your device on your home network.

Windows

Go to “Control Panel -> Network and Sharing Center -> Change adapter settings.” Right-click “Local Area Connection” and click Properties. Under the Networking tab, select “Internet Protocol Version 4” from the list and click Properties. In the new box, select “Use the following IP address.” What you enter here will depend on your IP settings. To check your IP settings, go to the command prompt and enter ipconfig /all. IP address: this needs to have the same subnet as your default gateway, so only change the numbers after the final dot. For example, our default gateway is “192.168.0.1,” and we made our IP address “192.168.0.100.” Subnet mask: enter the same number as what is shown in ipconfig. Default gateway: again, same numbers that you see in ipconfig. Preferred DNS server: same as the DNS servers in your ipconfig. When you’re finished, click OK, and you should have a functioning static IP address.

How to Open Ports and Set up Port Forwarding in Windows 10

First, remember that it might not be your router blocking ports but your firewall, so before digging in to your router, we need to go into the firewall settings and make sure all the relevant ports that you want to forward are open. If you’re just using Windows Defender Firewall (the default firewall in Windows 10), then click Start, type “firewall” and open Windows Defender Firewall. In the new window, click “Advanced settings” in the pane on the left. Now in the Windows Firewall advanced security window, click “Inbound Rules” in the pane on the left, then “New Rule” over on the right. In the new window, click Port, Next, then choose whether you want the port to use TCP or UDP forwarding. (TCP tends to be more popular as it error-checks.) Select “Specific local ports” and the port or range of ports you want to open. On the next screen, click “Allow the connection,” keep clicking next until you can give your new rule a name and description, then click Finish. The open port(s) will now appear as a rule in your Inbound Rule list, and those ports are ready to be used for forwarding.

Port Forwarding on Your Router

Once you’ve done that, and you still need to open up the ports, move on to the router. Again, this process will vary from router to router, but the general gist of it is the same. Here, we do it on a Virgin Hub 3.0.

  1. Log in to your router through your web browser. Our router address (default gateway) is 192.168.0.1, but this may be 192.168.1.1 for you or something else altogether. (Check out the cheatsheet for the list of IP addresses for your router.) There’s a good chance your router address (and password) is written on your actual router, so check that.
  2. Once you’ve logged in to your router, head over to “Port Forwarding.” For us, this is under “Advanced -> Security,” but it may vary slightly for you.
  3. Now, the important bit. You’ll be presented with a scary-looking list of boxes to fill with numbers. It’s not so bad.

Local IP: enter the number of the static IP address you set up earlier.Local start and end point: In most cases, these can be the same as the “external start point and external end point.” It can be a range of ports (8035-8040, for example), or it can just be one port in which case you put the same number into the start and end point boxes. If you have multiple devices connecting to the same application, then you may want to make the “local” port number different from the fixed “external” one.External start point and end point: this is dictated by the port used by your given application. Refer to the list we linked to earlier to find the application.Protocol: the application should specify what kind of protocol it uses. Most are TCP and some are UDP, but if you’re unsure, select “Both.”Enabled: switches the port forwarding on or off.

Below is the port forwarding setup we created to run a private Minecraft server using the port numbers assigned by Minecraft. Port forwarding has many uses, and while most applications are set up to do the job for you, it’s good to be prepared should you need to take control of the situation. Now you are, so happy forwarding! If you’re having problems connecting to the Internet or are getting strange “No Internet, Secured” messages, then head over to our guide for fixing this problem. Also, check out our guide on testing your hard drive health in Windows 10.