The Best Outdoor Wall Lights For Lighting Up Your Home

This is the lantern in our testing photos, fitted beside the front door of one of our rentals, and it gets regular compliments from visitors. The design mixes a traditional lantern shape with a slim black modern frame, and it looks just as smart in daylight as it does lit up.

The clear diffuser shows off the bulb, which is half the appeal. Because the LED bulb is replaceable, you can choose a filament style like ours for a warm glow or swap it for something different later without changing the fitting.

A sheltered front wall is where it belongs. Its IP44 rating keeps out splashes and rain, but that's lower than most lights in this list, so it isn't one we'd put on an exposed coastal wall where salt air and driving rain are part of the weather.

Up and down lights are our go-to beside front doors and garages, and the Klighten pair stands out because of how they're made. The bodies are aluminium rather than the steel used by many cheaper alternatives, and the tempered glass diffuser resists scratches and wipes clean.

They take GU10 bulbs, which matters more than it sounds. When a bulb fails you change the bulb, not the whole light, and you can choose any GU10 you like. We fitted Philips Hue GU10 bulbs during testing, which let us change the colour of the light from an app.

Klighten rates them at IP65 and offers anthracite, black, white, bronze and dark grey finishes. The instructions are clear and all the fixings are in the box, but the bulbs aren't, so add them to your order.

The MEIKEE floodlight is the sensor light in our testing photos, mounted on a brick wall, and it's the light we rate highest in our roundup of the best outdoor security lights. It throws out a very bright LED light, and the PIR sensor picks up movement from up to 12 metres away according to MEIKEE.

You can choose from 15 to 60 watt versions, so a small back garden and a long driveway can both be covered properly. This model is the fourth generation, with push buttons on the mount for changing the timer and light settings.

The bracket and sensor both angle independently, which helps aim the light at a path while the sensor watches the gate. It's rated IP66, so an exposed wall is no problem. The supplied cable is fairly short, so plan where it'll connect before drilling.

The Mr Beams spotlight runs on batteries, so there's no cable to run and no electrician to book. It fixes up with the supplied screws, and Mr Beams says fitting takes around five minutes. We put one on our garden shed and it went up quicker than that, needing nothing more than a drill.

For a battery light it's surprisingly bright. Mr Beams rates it at 200 lumens with coverage of up to 55 square metres, and the motion sensor reaches up to 9 metres. A light sensor stops it switching on in daylight, which saves the batteries.

It's compact enough not to dominate a wall and has been tested to IPX6. The trade-off is that the batteries need replacing, though the battery life is long. A sensor that triggers all evening, such as one facing a busy path, drains them faster, so aim it where it only picks up the movement you care about.

Solar power costs nothing to run, and there's no shortage of solar wall lights to pick from. The OUSFOT light did more than we expected during testing, mainly because it has two separate light heads that you can angle individually to cover two different spots.

The solar panel sits on an adjustable mount, so you can turn it to catch the most sun even when the light needs to face somewhere shadier. There's a motion sensor with a generous range, and OUSFOT rates the unit at IP65.

The LEDs aren't as strong as some of the other solar lights we've tried, so a large garden needs more than one. For a path, a back door or a patio where you only want a softer light, that lower output is no bad thing.

A coach lantern never looks out of place on a traditional house, and the CGC version is our favourite of the many available. It's built from black powder-coated aluminium that resists rust, which makes it a sensible choice near the sea where cheaper steel lanterns corrode.

CGC rates it at IP54 and says it'll stand up to harsh weather. All the fixings come in the box, and it takes a standard bulb of your choice. We fitted a Philips Hue bulb when we installed ours, which kept running costs down and gave us control from an app.

The one let-down is the polycarbonate dome over the bulb. It feels cheap next to the metal frame and can scratch over time, though plastic is common on lanterns at this price. It's available in black or grey and as a hanging version.