We’ve all been there. You connect to guest Wi-Fi in a hotel, gym, cafe or airport, in a place where a web page is supposed to appear to allow you to log in or agree to certain terms of use before you allow you to connect to the Internet. .
This is called a “captive portal” and can be a big source of frustration with the public or Wi-Fi. If you find that your iPhone or iPad connects to Wi-Fi but never opens the captive portal and won’t let you access the Internet, try these four tips. Most of them also apply to Mac.
The main thing is to be patient – sometimes it can take longer than expected for the portal to appear. If it doesn’t open after 30 seconds or it opens and is empty, try these steps.
For more help with your iPhone’s Wi-Fi, read: How to Stop an iPhone from Losing Wi-Fi Connection and Wi-Fi or 4G Not Working: How to Fix Internet Problems on iPhone.
Disable extensions
The web is a mess, and it’s not uncommon to run an ad blocker, script blocker, privacy protector, or other Safari add-on that can block or modify content. But these can prevent captive portals from appearing, so you’ll want to disable them for now.
Before connecting to guest Wi-Fi, open Safari and tap the button Drive on the left side of the address bar. Then choose Manage extensions and make sure your plugins are disabled. On a Mac, you will find a Extension cords in the Safari Settings menu.
Then try connecting to Wi-Fi again.
Manual control
If this doesn’t work even with your Safari extensions disabled, you can force the captive portal to open manually. Once connected to Wi-Fi, open Safari and navigate to captive.apple.com/hotspot-detect.html.
This often redirects to the captive portal for the Wi-Fi you are connected to and you are good to go.
Sometimes it will display what looks like a blank page with the word “Success” in very small font at the top left. If you see this, you may have already logged in to this portal and are authorized and logged in again. Just try going to another site to see if it works now.
Forget and reconnect
Sometimes you find yourself stuck in a sort of purgatory where your iPhone thinks you’re authorized and the Wi-Fi system thinks you’re not. One of the best ways to fix this problem is to forget about the Wi-Fi network and rejoin it again.
If your device says you have joined the Wi-Fi network (but you don’t have Internet access), open Settings, Wi-Fi,
You can then try to reconnect to that hotspot.
As a last resort, you can try the NeverSSL page.
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is very present on the Web today. Browsers make every effort to use encryption, strong authentication, etc. This is a very good thing! But sometimes, if a Wi-Fi management system is misbehaving or conflicts with your browser’s security features, it can prevent the captive portal authorization page from appearing.
Connect to Wi-Fi, then type http://neverssl.com into Safari’s address bar. You will be redirected to a page that does not use SSL, HTTP 2.0, HSTS or anything else. Just an old, outdated, insecure HTTP 1.0 page. Sometimes this old, insecure HTTP request will be exactly what causes the captive portal login page to appear.