To improve typing speed, practice 10 to 15 minutes every day, get your accuracy to 97% before you push for speed, and spend most of each session drilling the keys and words that slow you down. Retaking the same one-minute test and hoping the number rises is how people stay at 40 WPM for a year. This typing practice plan takes eight weeks and works on one thing per fortnight.
It assumes you already touch type at around 40 WPM with accuracy in the low nineties. If you still look at the keyboard, learn the letters first, starting on the home row and adding two or three at a time. To check, drape a tea towel over your hands and take a one-minute test; if accuracy drops more than a few points, spend a week on finger positions first.
Start on any Monday and count the weeks from there.
Why accuracy comes first
The fastest way to raise net WPM is usually to type slower.
That falls out of how the number is computed. Net WPM counts only words you typed completely correctly, as our scoring methodology explains. At 90% keypress accuracy, a six-keystroke word comes out clean about 53% of the time if errors land at random (0.9 to the sixth power), and every fix costs a backspace, a retype and a pause. At 97%, the same word is clean 83% of the time.
The research agrees. Dhakal and colleagues analysed 136 million keystrokes from 168,960 volunteers in 2018. Keystrokes per character, which rises with every backspace and retype, correlated with speed at r = -0.4, more strongly than uncorrected errors did (-0.21). Wasted keystrokes slow you down more than the mistakes you leave in.
So the whole first fortnight is about getting accuracy to 97% and keeping it there while the speed comes back on its own.
How long should you practice typing each day?
Ten to fifteen minutes, every day, including the days you don't feel like it. A four-minute session beats a skipped one.
A session has three parts, and the proportions change through the eight weeks:
- Warm-up: one 30-second word test at a comfortable pace, accuracy over speed. Two minutes.
- Drill: a practice drill, or the exercise from the fortnight's focus below. Five to eight minutes.
- Measure: one 1-minute test, or a quote test later in the plan. Write the result down. Three minutes.
Don't take ten measurement tests in a row. One test is a noisy sample, and chasing it is how people stay at the same speed for a year. Judge your week by the trend.
Weeks 1 and 2: accuracy to 97%
Set a pace you can hold at 97% or better. For most 40 WPM typists that's about 32 to 35 WPM, and yes, it feels slow. Stay there. The number you care about this fortnight is accuracy.
Don't watch a live speed readout while you type. It pulls your attention to the number and away from the text, and you'll speed up without meaning to.
What goes wrong: people hit 97% on day two and speed up on day three. Give it the full two weeks. The habit of not pressing a key until you're sure takes longer to set than the first clean test suggests.
What the results screen tells you now: the per-word breakdown colors each word by its burst speed. The words you slowed down on contain the letters you reach for awkwardly. Note them; week 3 is about them.
Weeks 3 and 4: weak keys and letter pairs
This is the part most practice advice skips, and it's where the speed is.
In the same 2018 dataset, the interval between keys on bigrams typed by alternating hands (one hand then the other, as in "th" or "en") predicted overall speed at r = -0.72, while letter repetitions predicted it at only -0.32. Fast typists overlap keys, pressing the next one before releasing the last. The average volunteer did this on 25% of keypresses; most fast typists did it on 40 to 70%.
Your results screen shows your most-missed keys and a per-word breakdown after every test. The practice page turns that into a drill: 50 real words weighted toward the keys you miss and the words that trip you up, mixed with common words so it still reads like normal text. As a guest it uses the tests on your device; signed in, it uses your account history. We use real words because the slow pairs you need to fix, like "ou" in "would", live inside them, and the common words around them keep the rhythm of ordinary typing, so drill gains carry over to tests.
Run the drill as your session's middle part every day this fortnight. Keep accuracy at 97%. Let speed creep up if it wants to; don't push it.
One honest note: the drill targets what your results say is weak, and that needs data. If you're coming in fresh, the first drills will be close to common words. After a few days of tests they won't be.
Weeks 5 and 6: push speed, then add punctuation
Now push. On the daily 60-second test, aim 5 WPM above your current average and accept accuracy dropping to 95% for a few days. If it drops under 93%, back off for a session. Many people see their biggest jump in this fortnight, because the accuracy work and the drill work pay out at once.
In week 6, switch the measurement test to the punctuation test two days out of three. This is the time to add punctuation, not earlier. Commas, apostrophes and capitals bring in the Shift keys and the right pinky, and adding them before your common letter pairs are solid just adds a second source of errors. Expect your number to drop noticeably when you switch and to recover most of it within the fortnight.
What goes wrong: fatigue. If accuracy falls within a session rather than across the week, stop early.
Weeks 7 and 8: quotes and longer tests
Switch the measurement test to quotes, and twice a week take a 2-minute test instead of a 60-second one.
Quotes have proper nouns, numbers and sentences that don't follow the common-word distribution, which is what real typing looks like. The two-minute test shows whether you can hold a pace, and the gap hides more than it seems. Say you average 60 WPM on 60-second tests and score 51 over two minutes, 15% lower. That's 102 words; if the first minute ran at your usual 60, the second ran at 42. If your 2-minute number is more than 15% under your 60-second number, you're typing at a sprint pace, and the fix is more two-minute tests.
By the end of week 8, a typist who started at 40 and did the sessions will usually measure somewhere in the 60s or low 70s on a 60-second words test at 96% or better. Eighty in eight weeks is possible and not typical.
How to read your results screen
A few numbers people ignore are more useful than the headline.
The per-second chart. A flat line with few errors is what you want. A line that starts high and sags is a pacing problem. Gaps are pauses, and in a words test a pause over 5 seconds marks the result "paused" and keeps it off the boards, though you still see every number.
Burst. Every word's own speed from first keystroke to the space. The slow words cluster around a few letters, and that cluster is your drill.
Consistency. The spread of your per-second raw speed, folded into a 0 to 100 score. Under 70 with good accuracy usually means hesitation, not finger errors, and the fix is familiarity with words, which quote tests give you. Over 85 at a speed you find hard means you're ready to push.
Corrected errors per 100 characters. The cost of your mistakes. In the 2018 study, Backspace and Delete made up 6.3% of keypresses on average. If you're well above that at 95% accuracy, you may be double-correcting: deleting more than you need and retyping it.
Why your typing speed stops improving
Everyone stalls somewhere, often in the 55 to 65 band. Three causes cover most of the cases we've watched in replays.
The first is that you've stopped drilling and are only measuring. Go back to weeks 3 and 4 for a week.
The second is a finger assignment that worked at 40 and doesn't at 60. The classic is reaching for "c" with the index finger, or "p" with the ring finger. Your most-missed keys will show the same key test after test. Retrain that one key; it costs a week and pays out quickly.
The third is looking down for numbers and symbols. The numbers test will tell you within a minute.
If none of those fits, the plateau is probably real and the next 10 WPM will take months rather than weeks. That's normal above 70, and the arithmetic shows why. A word is five characters, so 40 WPM is 300 ms per keystroke and 50 WPM is 240 ms: a 60 ms saving, mostly from hesitating less. From 70 to 80 is 171 ms to 150 ms, and that 21 ms has to come from overlapping keys, which takes months to train. Two WPM in a month is a good month at that level.
Keeping it going
Daily practice works because it's daily, and what stops it is usually one missed day turning into a missed week. The daily challenge keeps a streak for signed-in typists, and one finished run counts, however slow. We wrote a separate piece on daily streaks without burning out. A four-minute session keeps the habit intact, and the number follows the habit.
Frequently asked questions
How can I increase my typing speed fast?
Fix accuracy first, then drill your slowest keys and words for 10 to 15 minutes a day. If you've plateaued, the quickest single gain usually comes from retraining one badly fingered key.
Is 40 WPM a good typing speed?
It's a little under the 51.56 WPM average across the 168,960 volunteers in the 2018 Aalto and Cambridge study, and a sensible starting point for this plan. Our post on average typing speed has the comparisons.
Should I practice with a timer or a word count?
Use 60-second timed tests to measure and word or quote tests to practice. Add 2-minute tests once your 60-second number is steady, because they show the pace you can hold.