How to Use NordVPN: Tutorial for Beginners 2026

There are two types of people online. People who use VPNs and people who don't know that their IP address is basically yelling their location to the internet constantly. With NordVPN, you become the online equivalent of a ghost. So, today I'll show you how to set it up, use it across all your devices, unblock streaming content, and even transfer files with encryption like a secret agent using something called MeshNet. Let's disappear. First, what is a VPN? When you connect to the internet, your data travels openly, kind of like a motorcycle on a highway. Anyone watching, your internet provider, hackers, even websites, can see where you're going. A VPN like NordVPN creates a secure encrypted tunnel, your own private lane, so that your data can travel safely. It connects to a secure server which accesses the internet for you and sends the info back through that tunnel. This hides your real location and keeps your activity private. So whether you're on public Wi-Fi, trying to access content abroad, or just want more control over your privacy, NordVPN makes it incredibly easy. Now, let's get it set up. All right, start by clicking the special link in the video description below to get the best available deal on NordVPN. That'll bring you to this landing page. Click the orange button to get started, and you'll see four plan options: basic, plus, complete, and prime. I personally recommend the plus plan. It's the best value with extras like a password manager, ad blocking, and advanced browsing protection. All for only about a dollar per month more than basic. Click the button for the plan you want, and you'll land on the checkout page. Enter your email, choose any add-ons you want, and select your payment method: credit card, PayPal, and even crypto if you want full privacy. There isn't a free trial, but there is a 30-day money back guarantee, so there's zero risk. After checkout, your order will process for a few moments. Then, you'll be taken to this confirmation page. Click the blue activate Nord account button. Next, you'll need to verify your email. If you use Gmail or another major email provider, you can click the button below to open your email account directly from this page. Then check your inbox on the email you used during sign up and find your verification code. Go ahead and paste that code here. Next, create a password for your Nord account. Next, click the button to download the app for your operating system. Then click the downloaded file to run the installer. Follow the prompts of the installer to get set up. Your computer may prompt you for additional permissions along the way. Here you can see as soon as the app is finished installing, it opens up on my desktop. So I'll go ahead and close out the installer and close out my extra tabs. All right. Now that NordVPN is installed, check out how easy this is to get started. When I click quick connect in the top right, NordVPN finds the fastest server available nearby and locks down my connection. Just like that. Fast, private, and protected in seconds. Honestly, I wish everything else in life was this simple. So, what does this actually do? When you click quick connect, NordVPN encrypts your internet traffic and routes it through a secure server. That means your IP address and online activity are now hidden from your internet provider, hackers, or anyone snooping on public Wi-Fi. If you ever want to turn off the VPN, you can simply click the disconnect button. Quick Connect is a really easy way to simply turn your VPN on and connect to the nearest server. But what if you want to connect to a server in a specific location? You can do that in a couple of ways. Here you can see there's a map of the United States. So, if I wanted to connect to a server in Florida, I could simply click on Miami. And just like the quick connect button, it'll automatically connect me to a server in Miami. Now, you can also connect to a different country. You could do that by scrolling on the map and finding a different location or finding one from the list on the left. For example, if I wanted to connect to a server in Italy, I could type Italy in and then click on Italy from the list. And just like that, I'm transported to Italy. No passport or plane tickets required. Pretty cool, huh? Now that you see how easy it is to securely connect to a VPN, what if I told you we can make it even easier? If you're going to be using NordVPN a lot, you probably don't want to have to set it up every time you turn on your device. So, let me show you how to keep it running quietly in the background so you're always covered. On the bottom left side, click the gear icon to open settings. And then under general, toggle on the button for launch the app on computer startup. This way, as soon as you start your computer, NordVPN will get started. Next, let's turn on autoconnect. On the left side, click autoconnect and then click the toggle for when using untrusted network. Now, anytime your computer is connected to a new network, the VPN will turn on automatically. Here you can see I'm on a network. And if I wanted to trust my network so that the VPN didn't turn on, I could simply add it with this trust button. And now you can see that the VPN is disabled because I'm using trusted Wi-Fi. It's just as easy to remove trusted networks, too. You can click the minus icon next to the network name. And just like that, I'm autoconnected again to the fastest server. If there's a specific server that you want to autoconnect to, you can select your country from the drop down and then pick a city or just select the fastest server. Next, let's talk about the kill switch. Yeah, that sounds kind of scary, but it's actually really simple. On the left side, click kill switch. So essentially how the kill switch works is if the secure connection to your VPN server is dropped for any reason, you can set specific apps to stop connecting to the internet or even quit the app entirely so that your data isn't accidentally leaked. For example, let's say that I don't want Slack to connect to the open internet and I only want to use Slack when I'm on a VPN. I can select Slack from this applications list and open it to add it to the kill switch list. So now if my connection to a NordVPN secure server is dropped, the apps in this list will stop sending information over the open internet. And if you turn on this toggle, not only will the apps stop connecting to the internet, but they'll quit and close entirely for extra security. Pretty cool, right? Kill switches aren't so scary after all. Finally, let's talk about threat protection. Click on the shield in the left side to open threat protection pro. here. If you purchased the plus plan or higher, you'll have access to the threat protection pro features, which enable anti-malware, advanced browsing protection, and add and tracker blocking. Click the finish now button to get set up. Following the steps to set this up in NordVPN will trigger your computer to ask you for additional permissions. Go ahead and allow everything that it asks for. Click the continue button at the bottom. Check the box to enable cloud-based threat scanner. Click any links provided in the instructions and then follow the prompts. And when you're all done, you'll get a screen like this that shows you that the setup is complete and you have anti-malware, advanced browser protection, and add and tracker blocking enabled. Finally, I recommend turning on DNS filtering, which blocks ads and dangerous websites at the domain level. So, now that your VPN is running quietly in the background, what's it like browsing the internet with it? Let's check out some everyday stuff you'll want to know. Browsing the internet with a VPN turned on is pretty much exactly the same experience as browsing it with it turned off, except it's just safer. So, if I go to google.com and I'm connected to a US server, I'm going to see Google as it appears to a US audience. So, what happens if we change countries? Well, the cool part is we can do that really simply. On a Mac, there's a NordVPN icon in the top taskbar. And at any point, you can simply open a miniature version of NordVPN and change your location. So, let's change our location to Japan and see what happens. NordVPN will find the best server. Connect Tokyo. And now, let's refresh Google. And now just like that, we have Google in Japanese. Okay, so what do we do with this newfound power and flexibility? One use case that's incredibly common is unlocking content that's been georestricted. For example, let's go to Netflix. So let's say I'm from the United States traveling in Japan and I want to watch the same shows I've been watching at home. If I go to log into Netflix on a public Wi-Fi network at the hotel, this is probably what I'd see. As we scroll through, notice the collection of shows and movies. If we switch back to the United States and then refresh Netflix, notice that as we scroll through the United States version, there's different content. That's because the United States has a completely different content library than Japan. And because we have access to this other content library, I can catch up on the same shows I was watching at home. So, now we've got your computer covered, but what about your phone or your tablet? Next, let me show you how to keep other devices secure, too. NordVPN works on mobile devices, gaming consoles, and even smart TVs. Most of the time, you can just search for it in your devices app store, but for guaranteed security, it's best to grab the official download link directly from NordVPN's website. On your phone or tablet, go to nordvpn.com and then log into your account by tapping the hamburger menu at the top right and then tapping login. Follow the prompts to get logged in. Then once you land on your Nord account page, tap the hamburger menu in the top right again. Select downloads. Then the relevant download for your device should appear. Tap the button to download it and then follow prompts. On an iPhone like this, it routes me to the Apple App Store. Normally, you might see a get button, but since I've downloaded this before, I have the cloud download icon, and then I can tap open. The NordVPN app will open on your phone. Go ahead and follow the prompts. I'll tap accept, and then you'll need to log in. Tap the login button. and then log in to your Nord account. When you're done logging in, it may ask you if it can send you notifications. Go ahead and tap your preferred setting. I'll tap allow. And just like on a computer, I can click quick connect to launch the VPN. The first time you launch the VPN, you may need to give your phone additional permission. So follow the prompts to get that set up. I'll tap got it and then allow. Here I need to enter my iPhone passcode for verification. And I got a prompted to enable threat protection. So I'll go ahead and enable that. And I'll reconnect to apply the changes. And just like that, I am connected to a VPN on my phone so that I am browsing safely no matter if I'm on Wi-Fi or on cellular. Just like on the computer, all the same settings exist. So, you can go to the profile on the bottom right and then open up settings with the gear icon in the top right and dial in your autoconnect settings. Again, if you want to connect to a specific server, you can do that here, too. You'll notice, though, by default, it's zoomed out on the United States, and it looks like it's coming from the center of the United States. But if you zoom in, you can actually see which specific server you're connected to. And you could tap. So here I could connect to Dallas. There we go. Now your mobile device and computer are both protected. But did you know that NordVPN can also connect them to each other securely, even across different networks? That's what MeshNet does. It links your devices together like they're on the same Wi-Fi network, no matter where they are in the world. So you can share files or access one from the other with total privacy. On the computer, click this icon with four circles all connected together. This is the MeshNet icon. And then toggle on MeshNet. You may get a notification like this saying that MeshNet won't work with the autoconnect enabled. So we'll have to turn autoconnect off first. That's okay. We'll go do that real quick. So remember that's in settings. You can get there with a gear icon. and then on the left sidebar we can go to autoconnect and then disable autoconnect. Okay, let's go back to MeshNet and then toggle it on. We'll have to reconnect to the VPN to turn on MeshNet. So go ahead and click reconnect. And once it connects, you'll see that your computer has been given a Nord name as well as an IP address. Let's do the same thing on the mobile device. On mobile, click the little person in the bottom right to open the profile. And then remember, we're going to need to turn off autoconnect before we can turn on MeshNet. So go to the gear and then turn off autoconnect. Go back and then click on MeshNet and then turn on MeshNet. When it loads, you'll see that just like the computer, the device has been given a Nord name and has an IP address. We'll click got it. And now let's scroll down and share files. I want to send a big video file from my phone to the computer. So I'll click share files. And then we'll click photos. I have a bunch of random photos and videos here in my camera roll. But I'm going to send this 7 minute 39 screen recording I just captured. Normally, that'd be pretty big to send from one device to another over something like email. And if I were to use something like Google Drive or Dropbox, I would eat up precious storage space in my cloud. So, instead, we can send files using MeshNet. So, once I select the video file, it'll ask which device I want to send the files to. We can see on the computer that the computer's device name ends with Everest.Nord. So, that's the one we want to select here. I'll click that on the phone and then click send. On the phone, it'll say that it's waiting for the computer to accept the request to send the files. If this request doesn't show up on your computer right away, try going back to the main server selector page and then back to MeshNet. And you'll see that now the phone appears in the device list and there's a file transfer request notification in the top right. If the notification appears and then disappears before you had a chance to click it, you might also see a red dot next to this bell icon. Click the bell and then click review on the notification and then accept the file. Now you'll see on the phone that it starts to send the file and once it's complete it shows as file transfer complete on the phone and we can see that it's complete here on the computer. I'll click show and finder to open the file and then preview the video. Look at that. My screen recording's there. So, I've just showed you how to securely send files using MeshNet, but can you use the same technology to retrieve files remotely? Absolutely. Now, that's a little bit more complicated and beyond the scope of this tutorial, but if you're interested in learning more about this, go to the bottom left of the computer app and click knowledge base. When it loads, search for MeshNet and then click on the guide for users. Here, click on visit the MeshNet documentation. Here you can read detailed how-to MeshNet guides for things like gaming, remote file access, and doing joint projects. If you're interested in using any of these features, I highly recommend checking out this documentation. All right, so now your devices are locked down and your browsing's private. If you still need to sign up, don't forget the link in the description below has the best available deal. All right. Now, go browse something weird. Nobody's watching now.