GUIDE
How to type faster
Stop looking at the keyboard, fix your accuracy before chasing speed, use all ten fingers including the little ones, practise for ten minutes daily rather than an hour weekly, drill the specific keys that slow you down, and practise on text that looks like what you actually type.
Start by not looking
Every other piece of advice is downstream of this one. A glance at the keyboard is not a moment lost — it is a moment lost plus the re-find afterwards plus the fact that the glance is what stops your recall from ever forming. As long as looking is available, your hands will use it instead of remembering, and the memory you need will not get built.
This is unpleasant advice because not looking is much slower at first. It is also the only version of the advice that works. If you cannot resist, cover the keyboard — a cloth over your hands, or a keyboard cover, or simply a laptop screen angled to hide it. Two weeks of that will do more than two months of drills with your eyes down.
Fix accuracy before you touch speed
The fastest way to a higher net WPM, for almost everyone below about 70, is to make fewer mistakes rather than more keystrokes. An error costs the keystroke, the noticing, the backspace, the retype and the rhythm — several times its apparent price.
The practical version: take your comfortable speed and drop it by about a quarter, then type until you can go five minutes without an uncorrected error. It will feel like going backwards. Net speed usually passes its old level within a week or two, and keeps going, because you are no longer spending a third of your time undoing things.
| Racing | Steady | |
|---|---|---|
| Gross WPM | 75 | 62 |
| Accuracy | 92% | 99% |
| Characters typed | 375 | 310 |
| Errors to undo | 30 | 3 |
| Net WPM | ~45 | ~59 |
Use the fingers you are not using
Self-taught typists almost always under-use the little fingers and over-use the index fingers. It feels efficient — the index finger is strong and quick — and it caps you, because a finger that covers ten keys spends its time travelling rather than pressing.
The little fingers own A and semicolon, and also shift, enter, tab and backspace. That is a large share of everything you press. If you shift with the same hand that types the letter, or reach across for enter, those are specific habits with specific fixes, and they are worth a deliberate week each.
Practise the keys that are actually slowing you down
Typing speed is not uniform across the keyboard. Almost everyone has a short list of keys that cost them noticeably more time, and it is usually not the ones they would guess — the number row, certain punctuation, one awkward reach, and in many languages the accented characters they have quietly been avoiding.
This is what the list of missed keys after a test is for. It turns "I should practise" into a list of five or six characters, which is a week's work rather than an open-ended project. Fixing your three worst keys will do more for your average than another hundred general drills.
The same logic applies to word shapes. Speed comes from prediction — a familiar word is one motion, an unfamiliar one is a letter at a time — so drilling the most common words in your language buys more than drilling random letters, once the keys themselves are known.
Short and daily beats long and occasional
What you are building is recall, and recall decays between sessions. Ten minutes a day will take you past someone doing two hours every Saturday within a month, and the difference is not effort, it is spacing.
This is the entire reason a streak counter exists on this site, and it is not a trick. Frequency is the variable that matters most and it is the one people optimise least.
- Ten minutes, most days
- Enough to consolidate, short enough to keep doing.
- Stop while it is still going well
- Practising past the point of fatigue rehearses sloppy motions.
- Warm up
- Two minutes of home row before anything that will be measured.
- Do not test daily
- Measuring is not practising, and a daily number encourages racing.
Practise on text that resembles your real typing
A speed built on lowercase common words does not fully transfer, because real text has capitals, punctuation, numbers and proper nouns in it. If your test scores are well ahead of how fast you feel at work, this is usually why.
Turn punctuation and numbers on once the basics are steady. If you write code, practise on code — the symbol density and the bracket reaches are a genuinely different skill. If you write in two languages, practise both; the layouts share motions but not recall.
Questions
How can I type faster immediately?
You cannot, honestly — but you can get a net speed increase within a day by slowing down enough to stop making errors. That is not a trick; it is the arithmetic of net WPM. Real speed gains take weeks.
How long before I see improvement?
With ten to fifteen minutes most days, people generally notice a change within two to three weeks and a substantial one within a couple of months. The first week often feels like getting worse, particularly if you have stopped looking at the keyboard.
Do typing games help?
They are excellent at exposing which keys you only think you know, because under time pressure the shaky ones fail first. They are poor at teaching a key you have never drilled. Use them as a diagnostic and the lessons as the fix.
Would a better keyboard make me faster?
Marginally, and much later than people hope. Switch feel and key travel matter once technique is settled and make almost no difference before that. A new keyboard is a pleasant purchase and a poor substitute for two weeks of not looking down.
Put it into practice
Reading about typing is the smaller half. The beginner course starts on the home row, the speed test will tell you where you stand, and all of it works in 86 languages without an account.