Tips to type faster

There's no secret to typing fast. There's a small set of habits that, once they're truly automatic, make the difference between 50 and 100 words per minute. Here's what actually moves the needle.

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Touch typing is non-negotiable

If you still glance at the keyboard, you're capping your top speed permanently. Every glance is a 100 to 200 millisecond pause that can't be optimised away by typing harder. The fix is to stop looking, even when it slows you down at first.

Cover the keys with a cloth for a few practice sessions. Your hands learn much faster when you remove the option to cheat. After a week your accuracy will recover, and you'll never need to look again. If you're starting from scratch, the touch typing fundamentals page covers the full beginner curriculum.

Find and trust the home row

The little bumps on F and J exist so your index fingers can find their starting position by touch. From there, every other key has a fixed finger assignment in the standard touch-typing layout. Memorise the assignments and use them even when a different finger feels closer. The "shorter path" almost always loses to consistency.

Return to the home row after every reach. Hopping between keys without an anchor introduces drift, your hands lose their reference point, and your error rate climbs.

Accuracy first, speed second

This is the rule that everyone hears and most people ignore. Practising fast-and-sloppy gets you a fast-and-sloppy nervous system. You bake in the wrong patterns and you have to unlearn them later, which is harder than learning them right the first time.

Aim for 98% character accuracy in practice. If you're below that, slow down deliberately until you're back above it, then let the speed creep up on its own. The character accuracy stat on the results screen is the one to watch.

The accuracy-first rule isn't a moral position — it's arithmetic. A 5% error rate sounds small, but every error costs you roughly the time of typing the character plus correcting it: two keystrokes for the price of one, plus the cognitive interruption. A typist hitting 100 WPM gross with 5% errors lands somewhere closer to 80 WPM net once corrections are included. The same typist hitting 95 WPM gross with 1% errors nets a higher number than the "faster" one. Speed is what's left after accuracy has had its share.

Type to a steady rhythm

Fast typists don't sprint between pauses. They type at a remarkably even cadence, with most keystrokes landing at roughly the same interval. Bursts of speed followed by stalls are a sign that your fingers are fighting your eyes, not flowing with them.

Practising with a metronome is unusual but effective. Pick a tempo where you can hit every keystroke on the beat with high accuracy, then increment it slowly. The goal is to feel steady, not fast.

Read ahead

Your eyes should be one to three words ahead of your fingers at all times. If you're staring at the word your fingers are typing, you've already lost the queue your hands need to stay smooth. Build the habit deliberately on slower texts before pushing speed.

The bigram bottleneck

Most people who plateau at 80 WPM are not slow on every letter — they're slow on a handful of specific letter pairs. th, ou, and he are the most common English bigrams, but the ones that cost you are the ones with awkward finger transitions: br, sk, gh, qu, nm, my. Same-finger bigrams (typing two consecutive letters with the same finger) are particularly expensive on QWERTY — de, ec, un — because the finger has to lift off one key and travel before pressing the next.

The fix is to find your slow bigrams and drill them in isolation. After a test, look at your incorrect-words list — most errors cluster around three or four bigrams, not random scattering. Spend a few minutes typing those pairs deliberately at low speed, then mix them into normal text. After a week, those specific transitions get smoother and your overall WPM follows.

Multilingual considerations

Typing speed is language-specific in ways most typists don't realise. Different languages have different bigram frequencies, different capitalisation patterns, and different punctuation densities. Speaking fluent French doesn't make you a fast French typist if you trained on English — the muscle memory is for English bigrams, and reaches like é, ç, or AltGr combinations are a separate skill.

A few practical points if you type in more than one language:

• Long compound words (German, Dutch, Finnish) reward sustained accuracy far more than punctuation-heavy languages do; one mistake near the end of a 14-letter word costs the entire word.
• Romanised input (Japanese rōmaji, Pinyin) hides a layer of mental conversion. Your raw typing speed in those modes will lag your English speed even after the muscles catch up, because you're translating in parallel.
• Typing in your weak-side language for a few minutes during practice surfaces awkward fingerings that English never tests. It's one of the best plateau breakers.
• If you're switching between layouts (AZERTY at home, QWERTY at work), stay deliberately fluent in both rather than half-fluent in either — the keyboard layouts page goes into this.

Hardware that actually matters

Mechanical keyboards, ergonomic split designs, and exotic switches occupy a lot of typing-community attention. Most of it is hobby, not speed advantage. Here's what actually affects your top speed and what doesn't.

Things that do matter:

• Key travel that suits you. Very short travel (laptop chiclet keys) is fast for some, fatiguing for others. Very long travel (full mechanical with deep switches) feels great but adds a millisecond per keystroke. Most people land around 1.5–3mm of travel as the sweet spot.
• Keyboard at the right height. Wrists straight beats every other ergonomic factor. If your wrists bend up to type, lower the keyboard.
• A monitor at eye level. Looking down at a laptop screen tilts your head and tightens your shoulders, which surfaces in your typing as tension and missed keys.
• Quiet enough that you can hear yourself thinking. Typing tense and loud is correlated; calmer hands type more accurately.

Things that don't matter as much as the discourse claims:

• Switch type. Linear vs tactile is a feel preference, not a speed unlock. Pick the one you enjoy and stop changing.
• Mechanical vs membrane. Plenty of 100+ WPM typists are faster on cheap rubber-dome boards than people with $400 customs.
• Keycap profile. Cherry, OEM, SA, MT3 — comfort and aesthetics, not speed.
• Layout-changing keyboards alone. A split board doesn't type faster on its own; it just makes Colemak-DH ergonomically more compelling. Hardware is the enabler, not the cause.

Reading the result screen

After a test, most people scan for the WPM number and move on. The other numbers carry more useful information.

• Character accuracy is the lead indicator of sustainable improvement. If it's climbing test over test, your speed will follow even without forcing it.
• Word accuracy minus character accuracy tells you how "lumpy" your errors are. A small gap means errors are spread evenly; a large gap means a few words have multiple errors each, which usually points to a specific weak bigram or a moment of rhythm collapse.
• Incorrect-words list is where the next session's drill content lives. Don't dismiss it.
• WPM is the celebration metric, not the planning metric. It tells you how the run went; it doesn't tell you what to practise next.

The how it works page covers exactly how each of these is computed, including the edge cases.

Build a routine

Doing the right things for ten minutes a day beats doing them for two hours on a Saturday. The practice routines page walks through three sized routines (10-, 30-, and 60-minute) and a weekly shape that compounds. If you only have time for one of these pages today, that's the one to read.