How to type faster

Typing faster is mostly about removing the things that slow you down. Looking at the keyboard, fixing mistakes, hesitating between words, reaching with the wrong finger. Get rid of those and speed shows up on its own. Below are the eight habits we would teach a friend, in roughly the order we would teach them.

1. Measure where you are first

Before you change anything, get a baseline. Take three one-minute tests on ordinary text and write down the net WPM and the accuracy of each. Use the median, not the best. One lucky run tells you very little.

A one-minute test is the sweet spot for tracking progress. Fifteen-second tests are fun but noisy, because a single stumble or one easy sentence can swing the result by ten words per minute. If you want a fuller picture, add a 5-minute test once a week. The gap between your 1-minute and 5-minute scores tells you how much your speed fades when you get tired or lose focus.

Write the numbers down somewhere you will see them. Progress in typing is slow enough that you forget where you started, and seeing 38 turn into 52 over a month is what keeps most people going. If you are not sure what your numbers mean, our guide to what counts as a good typing speed puts them in context.

2. Fix accuracy before you chase speed

This is the single biggest habit, so it gets its own section.

A typo costs you three keystrokes: the wrong key, a backspace, and the right key. Often more, because you notice the error a few letters late and have to delete back. On top of that, the moment you spot a mistake you lose your rhythm, and it takes another word or two to settle again. People who type at 70 WPM with 90 percent accuracy are usually capable of 80 or more if they simply stopped making the errors.

Here is the rule we use: if your accuracy is under 96 percent, slow down until it is above 96 percent. Yes, your WPM will drop for a few days. That is fine. Clean, slower typing turns into clean, faster typing. Sloppy typing tends to stay sloppy.

Two things help with accuracy. First, type at a speed where you feel calm, about 10 to 15 percent below your best. Second, when you make an error, notice which key it was. Mistakes are rarely random. Most people have a handful of letter pairs they fumble every time, and those are what you will drill later.

3. Learn to touch type, properly

If you still look at the keyboard, or use two or three fingers, this is where your ceiling is. Some self-taught typists reach good speeds with their own system, but most hit a wall somewhere between 40 and 60 WPM because their eyes keep jumping between screen and keys and their fingers travel too far.

Touch typing means three things:

• Home position. Left fingers rest on A S D F, right fingers on J K L ;. The small bumps on F and J let you find them without looking.
• One finger per key. Every key belongs to a specific finger, and that finger always presses it.
• Eyes on the screen. Not on your hands. Ever, if you can help it.

Switching is painful for a week or two. You will drop to maybe half your old speed. Stick with it, because most people pass their old speed within three to six weeks and keep climbing after that. Our touch typing guide has a finger map and a four-week plan, and the typing lessons walk you from the home row to full sentences in twelve steps.

4. Read ahead and type in chunks

Watch a fast typist's eyes and you will see they are not looking at the letter they are typing. They are a word or two ahead. Slower typists tend to read a word, type it, stop, then read the next one. That little pause between words adds up fast.

Habits that help:

1. Keep your eyes one word ahead. While your fingers type "the", your eyes should already be on the next word. It feels odd at first. Practise on easy text where you are not worried about the spelling.
2. Think in chunks, not letters. Common words like "the", "and", "that" and "with" should come out as one movement, not three or four separate decisions. The same goes for common endings such as -ing, -tion and -ed. The more chunks you own, the less you think.
3. Don't pause at the space bar. The space is part of the word. Type "the " as a single unit, including the space, and roll straight into the next word.

A good drill: take a quote test and deliberately keep your eyes ahead of your fingers for the whole thing, even if you make a few more errors. Do three of those, then one normal test. Most people find the normal test feels smoother afterwards.

5. Practise on purpose, in short sessions

Typing a lot at work does not make you much faster on its own. You are practising your current habits, mistakes included. To improve, you need some practice where you are paying attention and pushing slightly past what is comfortable.

Three things make practice work:

Keep it short and regular

Fifteen to twenty minutes a day beats two hours on Sunday. Your hands learn movement patterns between sessions, and short, frequent practice gives them more chances to do that. It also keeps you fresh, and tired practice is where bad habits sneak in.

Drill your weak keys

Every typist has slow keys and awkward letter pairs. For many people it is anything involving the pinkies, the bottom row, or same-finger combinations like "ed", "un", "ce" and "my". Find yours and drill them directly. On Presspace, the keyboard heatmap in the Stats panel shows which keys you miss most and which ones you hit slowly, and the weak-key drills build practice text around exactly those letters.

Mix the material

Common-word tests are great for raw speed, but real writing has capitals, punctuation and longer words. Rotate between common words, quotes with punctuation, and the occasional numbers drill. If you write code, use a code typing test too, because brackets and symbols are a different skill.

If you want a ready-made schedule, our daily typing practice routine lays out a full week.

6. Type with rhythm, not bursts

Many intermediate typists type in bursts: fast through easy words, a stumble on a hard one, a pause, another burst. The bursts feel quick, but the stalls kill the average. Smooth, even typing at a slightly lower peak almost always produces a higher overall WPM.

Two habits help here:

• Slow down on hard words, speed up on easy ones, but only a little. The goal is a steady flow. If a word like "rhythm" or "necessary" trips you, type it deliberately rather than racing it and fixing it.
• Use a pace target. A metronome or pace line forces even timing. On Presspace, Tempo gives you a metronome beat to type to, and Treadmill sets a pace line that chases you. Set the pace about 5 WPM above your comfortable speed and try to hold it without falling apart.

Our results screen shows a consistency score, which measures how much your speed varies across a test. If your consistency is low, smoothing out your rhythm is probably the quickest win available to you.

7. Sort out your setup

This won't add 20 WPM, but a bad setup can quietly hold you back and make long sessions uncomfortable.

• Keep your wrists off the desk while typing. Resting them makes your fingers reach instead of your hands moving, which slows you down on the top and bottom rows. A palm rest is for pauses, not for typing.
• Elbows at roughly a right angle, shoulders relaxed, screen at about eye level so you are not hunched.
• Use a keyboard you can practise on every day. Switching between a laptop and a very different desktop board is fine, but your first few minutes on the less familiar one will be slower. Most practice should happen on the keyboard you use most.
• Light touch. You do not need to hammer keys down to the bottom. Pressing just hard enough to register is faster and kinder to your hands.

We cover posture, desk height and breaks in more detail in our typing ergonomics guide. If anything hurts when you type, stop and see a doctor or physiotherapist. Pain is not something to push through.

8. Break through plateaus

Almost everyone gets stuck at some point. A typical pattern is quick progress for a few weeks, then the same score for a month. Plateaus usually mean your practice has become comfortable. You are repeating what you already do well.

Things that reliably shake a plateau loose:

1. Overspeed bursts. Type 15-second tests where you deliberately go faster than you can type cleanly. Accept the errors. You are teaching your hands what the next speed feels like. Then go back to a one-minute test at normal effort.
2. Go slow on purpose. The opposite also works. Spend a session typing at 70 percent of your best speed with near-perfect accuracy, paying attention to each finger's movement. This often exposes a bad habit you have stopped noticing, like a ring finger reaching for a key that belongs to the middle finger.
3. Change the material. If you always type the top 200 English words, try longer word lists, quotes, or punctuation-heavy text. New material breaks autopilot.
4. Take a few days off. It sounds backwards, but many typists come back from a short break slightly faster. Rest is part of how skills settle.

Games are useful here too, because they make you type under different kinds of pressure. A reaction game like Key Reflex sharpens single-key speed, and a race like Nitro pushes you to keep pace with an opponent. You can find all of them on the typing games page.

A 20-minute session you can start today

If you want something to do right now, here is the session we would give a friend. It covers all of the habits above without needing a plan or a spreadsheet.

Log the final one-minute score and its accuracy every day. Look at the weekly median, not the daily number, because daily scores bounce around a lot. If the median goes up, keep going. If it has been flat for two weeks, pick one of the plateau tactics above and change something.

To see exactly how your score is worked out, including the difference between raw and net speed, read how WPM is calculated. Then take a 1-minute test, write down your number, and start tomorrow's session from there.

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