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How to Increase Typing Speed: Drills That Actually Work

Intermediate guide · about 6 minutes to read

Most people stop improving not because they lack talent but because they keep repeating text they are already good at. Speed comes from attacking your weakest keys, smoothing your rhythm and fixing the small habits that cost you whole seconds.

First, get your baseline

Run one clean three minute test on the practice test page and write down two numbers: WPM and accuracy. Without a baseline you cannot tell whether a change helped. Then retest once a week, not once an hour — daily fluctuation of five WPM means nothing.

1. Chase accuracy, and speed follows

This is counter-intuitive but it is the highest-leverage change most typists can make. Every error costs a backspace plus a retype, so errors are roughly twice as expensive as they look. Deliberately type at about 80% of your maximum until you can hold 97–98% accuracy, then let the speed creep up. Accuracy-first practice also stops you from burning in wrong finger habits at speed.

2. Find your slow keys and drill only those

Your overall WPM is an average that hides a few genuinely bad keys — usually Q, Z, X, P, the number row and symbols. Paste a custom string into the practice test that is dense in your problem letters and run it for three minutes:

3. Train rhythm, not bursts

Fast typists are not people who occasionally explode into speed; they are people with an even gap between keystrokes. Research on typing behaviour found that the tell-tale trait of fast typists is smooth overlap between keystrokes — they begin the next key before finishing the last — rather than raw finger speed (Aalto University study of 136 million keystrokes).

Practical version: type to a steady mental beat and refuse to speed up on easy words. Sound feedback helps here, which is why TypeFlowUltra plays a keystroke tick — irregular ticks are instantly audible.

4. Stop using backspace mid-word

Many typists hit backspace reflexively three or four times a sentence. Instead, finish the word, then correct it. Better yet, use Ctrl + Backspace to delete a whole word in one motion. Fewer, larger corrections are far cheaper than a constant stream of small ones.

5. Type words, not letters

Common English words — the, and, that, with, because, people, should — should become single trained motions rather than four separate decisions. Pick ten high-frequency words and type each one twenty times in a row. It feels mindless; it is exactly how chunking is built. This is the whole purpose of Day 10-12.

6. Push past a plateau with over-speed intervals

If you have been stuck at the same number for weeks, alternate one minute at roughly 120% of your target speed (accuracy will collapse, that is fine) with two minutes back at normal, careful pace. The fast interval raises your ceiling, the slow interval rebuilds precision. Three rounds is enough for one session.

7. Practise real text, not just drills

Drills train fingers; paragraphs train endurance and punctuation. Once a week type something real — an article, an email you actually need to send, a page of a book — for five straight minutes. Day 19-23 is built around exactly this.

8. Fix the environment

• Keyboard. Any keyboard with consistent travel works. A mechanical board can feel nicer but will not add WPM on its own — technique will.
• Height. If you are reaching up to the keys, your wrists absorb the effort and you tire in ten minutes.
• Distraction. Typing speed is attention-limited. A twenty minute session with notifications off beats an hour with them on.

9. Track the curve, not the day

Progress is jagged. Bad days happen with poor sleep, and one bad test is not a trend. The progress page keeps your rolling average of the last ten runs, your best score and your streak, which is a far more honest signal than any single attempt.

A four week plan to reach 60 WPM

For context on what to aim for, see average typing speed benchmarks. If you are not yet typing without looking at the keyboard, go back to touch typing fundamentals first — speed work on a broken finger map just makes bad habits faster.