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Filtering the wifi itself
One setting on the router, and every device in the house is filtered at once — the tablet nobody thinks about, the smart TV, the laptop, and whatever comes through the door. It costs nothing and it is the least-known useful thing in this whole subject.
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Understand what you are about to change
Every time a device looks up a website it asks a phone book called DNS for the address. By default that phone book belongs to your internet company and answers every question.
You are going to point the router at a different phone book — one that simply does not answer for the categories you have blocked. Nothing gets installed on any device, and it applies to everything on the wifi at once, including the smart TV and whatever a guest brings into the house.
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Pick a service
All three below do the same core job. Start with the free one if you want this done in ten minutes; move up if you want to choose categories or see what was actually requested.
OpenDNS FamilyShield
FreeTwo addresses you type into the router. Blocks adult content and nothing else — no account, no dashboard, no per-device rules. The simplest possible starting point.
CleanBrowsing
Free filters; paid plans from roughly $75/year for a home networkThe free tier is a set of preset filter levels. Paying adds categories, SafeSearch enforcement and coverage for devices when they leave the house.
NextDNS
Free below a monthly query limit; around $19.90/year to remove itThe most configurable of the three — custom blocklists, per-device rules, and logs of what was actually requested. Best value here if you are willing to read a dashboard.
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Get into your router settings
Type 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.0.1 into a browser on a device connected to the wifi. One of the two is almost always right. The username and password are often printed on a sticker on the router itself.
If your internet company manages the router and you cannot get in, call them and say you want to set custom DNS servers. This is a normal request and they will know what you mean.
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Find the DNS fields and enter the addresses
Look for Internet, WAN, or Network settings — then DNS
There will be a primary and a secondary DNS field. Replace whatever is in them with the two addresses from the service you picked.
For OpenDNS FamilyShield those are 208.67.222.123 and 208.67.220.123. For CleanBrowsing and NextDNS, take the addresses from their own site — they differ per plan, and typing the wrong ones just makes the internet stop working.
Do not skip this. Save, then restart the router. Some routers keep serving the old settings until they are restarted, which makes people think it did not work.
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Test it before you believe it
From a device on the wifi, try to load something that should now be blocked. You should get a block page or a failure, not the site.
If it still loads, the device may be remembering an old answer — restart the device, or try it from a different one.
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Know exactly what this does not cover
The moment a phone leaves the house, or switches from wifi to cellular data, the router is no longer involved and none of this applies. On an iPhone, blocking Cellular Data Changes in Screen Time helps here.
A device can also be set to use its own DNS and ignore the router's, and some browsers route their lookups over an encrypted connection that skips the router entirely. Neither is difficult to do deliberately.
So treat this as a floor under everything else — excellent value for free, genuinely useful against accidents, and not something to lean on for a determined teenager with a phone.
One honest caveat about the free tier
Free DNS filtering blocks by category, and categories are blunt. It will not know that a particular page on an otherwise ordinary site is a problem, because it never sees the page — only the address. If what you need is judgement about the content itself, that is what the paid filters do, and no amount of router configuration replaces it.