How to Improve Your Typing Speed: 10 Practical Tips

Most people type roughly the same way they learned — looking at the keyboard, using a handful of fingers, making the same mistakes in the same places. The gap between a 35 WPM typist and a 70 WPM typist isn't talent or natural ability. It's almost entirely technique and deliberate practice.

The good news: the core techniques are well understood and the gains come faster than most people expect. Here are ten changes that actually move the needle, ordered from highest to lowest impact.

1 Understand Your Current WPM

Before you can improve, you need an honest baseline. Many people overestimate or underestimate their speed because they've never taken a consistent, timed test.

Take a 60-second typing test two or three times in the same session and average the results. That's your real starting WPM. Write it down. You can't measure improvement without a baseline.

Pay attention to your accuracy percentage, not just WPM. A score of 55 WPM at 88% accuracy is a different problem than 45 WPM at 98% accuracy. Each calls for a different focus.

2 Focus on Accuracy First

This is the most important principle in improving typing — and the one most people skip. Typing faster than your accuracy allows doesn't build speed; it builds errors.

Every time you mistype and correct yourself, you spend more time than you saved by rushing. Worse, if you practise making the same mistakes consistently, your fingers memorise those mistakes. Correcting deeply ingrained error patterns later is harder than building correct habits from the start.

The rule: aim for 95% accuracy or above at any speed. If accuracy falls below 90%, slow down — don't push through. Speed increases naturally as correct finger movements become automatic. The path to 80 WPM runs through clean 40 WPM, not sloppy 60 WPM.

3 Learn Touch Typing

Touch typing — typing without looking at the keyboard — is the single largest lever available to most typists. It removes the constant visual interruption of glancing down, reduces the distance your fingers travel, and lets your hands develop automatic spatial awareness of key positions.

The method is based on home-row positioning. Each finger is assigned to a set of keys anchored to a rest position:

• Left hand: little finger → A, ring → S, middle → D, index → F
• Right hand: index → J, middle → K, ring → L, little → ;
• Thumbs rest on the Space bar
• Most keyboards have small tactile bumps on F and J to locate home row without looking

From these anchor positions, each finger reaches up, down, or sideways to its designated keys and returns after each press. This minimises hand movement — which is exactly why touch typists are faster.

Expect a temporary slowdown of one to three weeks when you first switch. That's normal — your brain is rebuilding muscle memory from scratch. Most people surpass their pre-touch-typing speed within four to six weeks and continue improving well beyond it.

4 Use Correct Finger Positioning

Even if you're not fully committed to touch typing yet, using more fingers more consistently produces immediate gains. Hunt-and-peck typists typically use two to four fingers. Every additional finger you put to work reduces how far each finger must travel.

Posture matters too

Keep your wrists slightly raised rather than resting on the desk while typing. Wrists flat on the surface restrict finger movement and cause fatigue faster. Keep your elbows roughly at a 90-degree angle and your fingers naturally curved — as if loosely holding a ball.

Tense hands slow you down. If you notice your shoulders or forearms tightening during a session, shake your hands out and reset. Relaxed muscles move faster and more accurately than tense ones.

5 Keep Your Eyes on the Screen

Every time you glance at the keyboard, you interrupt your visual connection with the text, lose your place, and have to re-acquire it. At 40 WPM those interruptions add up to several seconds per minute. At 60+ WPM they're severely limiting.

The fix is deliberate and uncomfortable at first: keep your eyes on the screen even when you make mistakes. Resist the urge to verify finger placement visually. The discomfort fades within days as your fingers learn where the keys are without visual confirmation.

If you truly can't resist looking, try placing a thin book or a piece of card over your hands while you type. It's a low-tech solution that forces the habit quickly.

6 Practise Regularly — Not Sporadically

Typing is a motor skill. Like any motor skill, it's built through consistent repetition over time — not through single long sessions. Two 60-second tests every day for a month will produce more improvement than one 30-minute session per week.

A realistic and effective daily structure:

• Warm up (2–3 min): one or two short tests on Easy difficulty to get your fingers calibrated
• Main practice (8–10 min): two or three tests on your current difficulty, focusing on accuracy
• Challenge (optional, 2 min): one test one level above your usual to push your ceiling

That's 10–15 minutes total. At this cadence, most people see a meaningful WPM increase within two to three weeks.

7 Identify and Reduce Your Common Errors

Most typists make the same mistakes repeatedly — the same key combinations, the same transpositions (typing "teh" for "the"), the same reaches that miss. Random errors are normal; patterned errors are a technique problem.

Pay attention during tests to which characters or combinations consistently trip you up. Common culprits include:

• Keys reached by the weaker ring and little fingers (Q, A, P, ;)
• Common digraphs like "th", "st", "tr" where fingers overlap
• Capitalised letters requiring the Shift key — especially with non-dominant hand pinky on Shift
• Numbers and punctuation marks that require reaching to top row

Once you've identified your problem areas, drill them intentionally. Even 2–3 minutes of focused practice on a single key combination produces rapid improvement.

8 Practise With Varied Text

If you always practise on the same passage, you're partly memorising that specific text rather than building transferable typing skill. Your WPM on familiar text will be misleadingly high compared to your speed on new material.

Practising across different text types — conversational prose, technical writing, short words, long words — forces your fingers to handle a wider range of key combinations. TypeRacer Pro includes 90+ unique passages across Easy, Medium, and Hard difficulty to keep practice varied and progressively challenging.

Moving between difficulty levels is especially useful. Easy mode builds speed on common short words. Medium and Hard introduce longer, less frequent words and more complex sentence structures — which is what real-world typing actually looks like.

9 Track Your Progress Consistently

Progress in typing feels invisible day to day but is clearly visible over weeks when you track it properly. Without tracking, it's easy to feel stuck and give up during normal plateaus.

A few rules for meaningful tracking:

• Always use the same test duration when comparing results — 60s to 60s, 120s to 120s
• Track accuracy alongside WPM — a rising WPM with falling accuracy means you're pushing too hard, not improving
• Look at weekly trends, not individual sessions — daily variance is normal and expected
• Note plateaus without panicking — a two-week plateau usually means a technique habit needs refining, not more volume

TypeRacer Pro saves your last 10 results automatically in your browser. Check the history section at the end of each week to see your trend.

10 Use a Typing Speed Test as a Practice Tool

A typing speed test isn't just a measurement — it's a practice environment. Timed tests create mild performance pressure that mimics real-world conditions better than untimed copying exercises. The live WPM counter lets you pace yourself and learn what maintaining a consistent rate feels like.

Letter-by-letter feedback — green for correct, red for incorrect — makes errors feel immediate rather than distant. That immediacy accelerates learning because your brain connects the incorrect movement with its consequence before you've moved on.

You can also use different test lengths deliberately. Short 30-second tests are good for isolating burst speed. Longer 120-second tests expose consistency issues and fatigue effects that shorter tests hide. Both are useful data points for different aspects of improvement.

Conclusion

Improving at typing comes down to a short list of things done consistently: build accurate habits before pushing for speed, anchor your hands to the home row, keep your eyes on the screen, and practise for 10–15 minutes every day. These aren't revolutionary ideas — but most people skip at least two or three of them, which is exactly where the gap between average and fast typists comes from.

If you take one thing from this article: slow down to speed up. Clean, accurate typing at a moderate pace is the foundation every fast typist built on.