How to Increase Typing Speed: A Complete Guide

What Is Typing Speed and How Is It Measured?

Typing speed is measured in Words Per Minute (WPM) — the number of words you can type correctly in 60 seconds. Most typing tests define one "word" as five characters including spaces, so a score of 50 WPM means you typed roughly 250 characters per minute without errors.

Here is a simple benchmark to understand where you currently stand:

• Under 30 WPM — Beginner. You likely use two or three fingers and look at the keyboard frequently.
• 30–50 WPM — Below average. Some habits are formed, but speed and accuracy need serious work.
• 50–70 WPM — Average. Most office workers and casual computer users fall in this range.
• 70–90 WPM — Above average. You type faster than most people around you.
• 90–120 WPM — Advanced. You are at the level of professional typists and fast writers.
• 120+ WPM — Expert. You are in the top percentile of typists worldwide.

Do not get discouraged by where you start today. The biggest speed gains happen in the early stages when you fix foundational habits. Many people jump from 30 WPM to 60 WPM in just 4 to 6 weeks of focused, daily practice.

Want to know your current typing speed right now?
Take a free test on Funtwitch Typing — a clean, distraction-free typing speed tool that measures your WPM and accuracy in real time. Bookmark it and use it every day to track your progress.

Why Most People Stay Slow at Typing (And How to Fix It)

Before jumping into the improvement steps, it helps to understand why most people plateau at slow speeds for years. The answer almost always comes down to three root causes:

1. Bad habits formed early. Most people learned to type on their own with no guidance. They developed a 2–4 finger "hunt and peck" style that feels comfortable but has a hard speed ceiling of around 40 WPM.
2. No intentional practice. Simply using a keyboard for work or chatting does not improve your speed. It only reinforces whatever habits you already have — good or bad.
3. Prioritizing speed over accuracy. Rushing leads to more errors. More errors slow you down and teach your fingers wrong patterns. It becomes a cycle that stunts growth permanently.

The fix for all three is the same: go back to basics, rebuild with proper technique, and practice with intention rather than just volume.

Step 1: Prioritize Accuracy Over Speed

This is the single most important rule that every fast typist follows — and the one that most beginners ignore. When you try to type fast before your fingers know the correct positions, you are training yourself to make fast mistakes. Over time, those mistakes become deeply wired habits that are incredibly hard to undo.

The correct approach is to slow down and type accurately. Aim for zero errors, even if that means going at a pace that feels painfully slow at first. When accuracy becomes automatic, speed follows naturally — without extra conscious effort.

A useful rule of thumb: never let your error rate exceed 3% during practice sessions. If you make more mistakes than that, you are typing too fast for your current skill level. Slow down, reset, and rebuild.

Why Accuracy Matters More Than You Think

Every time you make an error while typing fast, you have to stop, backspace, and retype. On a sustained basis, a typist with 80 WPM raw speed and 97% accuracy will finish work faster than someone typing 100 WPM with 85% accuracy. Accuracy is efficiency. Build it first, always.

Step 2: Master Touch Typing and Proper Finger Placement

Touch typing is the technique of typing without looking at the keyboard, using all ten fingers, each assigned to a specific set of keys. It is the foundation of every fast typist, and learning it is non-negotiable if you want to break past 60–70 WPM.

The Home Row — Your Starting Point

The home row is the middle row of the keyboard. This is where your fingers rest by default and return to after every keystroke:

• Left hand: A, S, D, F — with your index finger on F (feel the small raised bump)
• Right hand: J, K, L, ; — with your index finger on J (feel the small raised bump)
• Thumbs: Both thumbs rest on or near the spacebar

Finger-to-Key Assignments

Each finger is responsible for a specific column of keys. Here is the standard touch typing assignment:

• Left pinky: Q, A, Z and the Tab, Caps Lock, Shift keys
• Left ring finger: W, S, X
• Left middle finger: E, D, C
• Left index finger: R, F, V, T, G, B
• Right index finger: Y, H, N, U, J, M
• Right middle finger: I, K, comma
• Right ring finger: O, L, period
• Right pinky: P, semicolon, slash, Enter, Backspace, Shift

Key Posture Tips

• Keep your wrists slightly elevated — do not press them flat on the desk while typing
• Curve your fingers naturally over the keys, not flat or stiff
• Keep your elbows at roughly 90 degrees
• Your monitor should be at eye level to avoid neck strain during long sessions

At first, typing with all ten fingers in the correct positions will feel very slow and awkward. This is completely normal. Your brain is building new neural pathways. Push through the discomfort — within 2 to 3 weeks, it will start to feel far more natural than your old habits.

Step 3: Stop Looking at the Keyboard

This is the habit that separates slow typists from fast ones more than almost anything else. Every time you glance down at the keyboard, you break your rhythm, slow your pace, and prevent muscle memory from forming properly.

Looking at the keyboard is a crutch. The longer you rely on it, the harder it becomes to stop. The fix is to commit to not looking — even if you type slowly and make more mistakes in the beginning.

How to Train Yourself to Stop Looking

• Cover your hands with a cloth or place a piece of paper over them while practicing
• Try using a keyboard with blank keycaps for a week — it forces you to type by feel
• Keep your eyes on the screen text at all times, never the keys
• When you feel the urge to look down, pause, reset your fingers to the home row, and continue without looking
• Accept that your speed will temporarily drop — this phase passes quickly

Most people who commit to this for just two weeks report that they no longer need to look at the keyboard at all. The fingers simply know where to go without any conscious thought.

Step 4: Practice Daily — Consistency Beats Intensity

Typing speed is built through repetition over time, not through marathon sessions. Practicing for 10 to 15 minutes every single day will produce far better results than typing for 2 hours once a week.

Think of it like learning a musical instrument or a sport. Short, focused daily sessions build muscle memory deeply and durably. Long, infrequent sessions build fatigue and teach bad habits under stress.

How to Structure Your Daily Practice Session

1. Warm up (2–3 minutes): Type home row keys and short common words like "the," "and," "for," "but" to activate your muscle memory before moving on.
2. Drill weak spots (5 minutes): Identify which keys or key combinations slow you down most. Focus specifically on those. Common trouble areas include Q, Z, X, P, number keys, and punctuation.
3. Full typing practice (5–7 minutes): Type full sentences or paragraphs from real content — articles, books, your own work notes. Accuracy first, then let speed emerge naturally.
4. Speed test (1–2 minutes): End every session with a timed WPM test. Record the score. Watching it climb week over week is one of the most powerful motivators you will find.

Make Funtwitch Typing your daily practice tool. Use it to warm up, run timed tests, and track your WPM progress over time. It is free, distraction-free, and designed for exactly this kind of consistent daily practice.

Step 5: Use Timed Tests to Measure Your Progress

What gets measured gets improved. Running regular timed typing tests is one of the most effective strategies to stay motivated and pinpoint exactly where you need more work.

Use different test lengths for different purposes:

• 15-second tests — For raw burst speed. Good for warm-ups and discovering your absolute ceiling WPM.
• 1-minute tests — The standard benchmark. Best for tracking your regular WPM improvement week over week.
• 3 to 5-minute tests — For measuring sustained speed and accuracy under fatigue. This is the most realistic measure of your real-world typing ability.

Keep a simple log — even just a note on your phone — recording your WPM and accuracy after each session. After 30 days, the progress you will see will motivate you to keep going harder.

Step 6: Practice with Real-World Content, Not Random Keys

Many typing tools have you practice by typing random strings of letters or nonsense words. While this can help with basic finger positioning, it does not build the practical, usable typing speed you need for real work.

Real typing speed comes from training on real language patterns. Here is what to practice with instead:

• The 200 most common English words — These words account for more than 50% of all everyday written text. If you can type them effortlessly, your overall speed in real tasks improves dramatically.
• Content from your actual work — If you write code, practice typing code. If you write reports, type paragraphs from reports. Your fingers learn the specific patterns you actually need most.
• Books and articles — Typing passages from books or news articles builds vocabulary-level muscle memory and keeps practice interesting enough to maintain daily.
• Punctuation-heavy text — Most people practice words but neglect commas, periods, quotes, and colons. Include content with heavy punctuation to build full typing fluency across all keys.

Step 7: Identify and Fix These 6 Common Mistakes

Most people unknowingly repeat the same mistakes that put a hard ceiling on their typing speed. If you recognize any of these in your own habits, fixing them will immediately unlock measurable improvement.

1. Typing too fast with low accuracy. Speed without accuracy is counterproductive. Every error forces a correction, and more importantly, trains your fingers into wrong patterns that become harder to unlearn over time.
2. Looking at the keyboard. Already covered — but worth repeating. This single habit is the number one bottleneck for the vast majority of slow typists. Stop it completely.
3. Using only 2 to 4 fingers. Hunt-and-peck typing has a physical speed ceiling. There is simply no way to reach 70+ WPM using only a few fingers. All ten fingers must be trained and used.
4. Only practicing comfortable keys. Most people drill the keys they are already good at because it feels good. But your overall typing speed is limited by your slowest keys. Find your weak spots and drill those specifically.
5. Skipping rest breaks. Typing through fatigue causes accuracy to collapse and creates sloppy habits. Take a 2–3 minute break every 25–30 minutes. Your fingers and brain both require recovery time.
6. Not tracking progress. Without measuring, you have no idea if what you are doing is actually working. Track your WPM and accuracy consistently so you can adjust your approach when progress stalls.

Step 8: Set Realistic, Weekly Improvement Goals

One of the biggest mistakes new typists make is expecting overnight results. Typing speed builds gradually and the timeline looks different for everyone depending on their starting level, practice consistency, and how quickly they drop bad habits.

A realistic and sustainable improvement target is 3 to 5 WPM per week when practicing consistently. That might not sound dramatic, but consider: at just 4 WPM per week, you gain 16 WPM in a single month. Over three months, that is nearly 50 WPM of improvement from where you started.

A Simple 3-Month Typing Improvement Roadmap

• Month 1 — Rebuild the Foundation: Focus entirely on correct technique. Learn touch typing. Stop looking at the keyboard completely. Accept that your speed may temporarily drop as you rebuild habits from scratch. Target: 40–50 WPM with 95%+ accuracy.
• Month 2 — Build Speed Gradually: Increase practice intensity. Drill common words and real sentences. Run timed tests consistently and log your scores. Target: 55–65 WPM.
• Month 3 — Refine and Push: Practice under time pressure. Work on sustained accuracy in longer tests. Target your weakest key combinations aggressively. Target: 70–80 WPM and beyond.

Review your progress every two weeks. If you have stalled, it usually means one of two things — either you are not practicing consistently enough, or you are repeating the same comfortable content instead of challenging yourself on weak areas.

The Best Tools to Practice and Improve Your Typing Speed

Having the right tools makes a genuine difference. Here are the best ways to practice and build typing speed effectively:

Online Typing Test and Practice Tools

• Funtwitch Typing — A clean, focused typing speed test to measure your WPM and accuracy without distractions. Perfect for daily warm-ups and consistent progress tracking. Use it every single day.
• Keybr — Adapts to your weak keys and generates practice text that specifically targets your problem areas so you improve where it matters most.
• Monkeytype — Highly customizable timed tests with a wide range of word lists, quote modes, and difficulty settings.
• TypingClub — Structured, lesson-based learning for complete beginners who want to learn touch typing from absolute zero.

Keyboard Tips for Faster, More Comfortable Typing

• A mechanical keyboard gives tactile feedback that can noticeably improve accuracy and typing feel. Cherry MX Brown switches are a popular choice for typists.
• Keep your keyboard at a comfortable height with your wrists roughly level with or slightly lower than your elbows.
• Keep your keyboard clean. Sticky or unresponsive keys create tiny hesitations that add up significantly over long sessions.

Bonus Tips to Accelerate Your Improvement

These extra habits might seem minor, but they consistently produce faster results for serious learners:

• Apply your improved technique everywhere, all the time. Use correct touch typing in all real typing — emails, messages, social media, notes. Do not switch back to old habits outside of formal practice sessions. Every keystroke counts.
• Learn keyboard shortcuts. Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+A, Win+D — shortcuts reduce how often you reach for the mouse and keep your hands in a ready typing position. Power users gain enormous real-world efficiency from shortcuts alone.
• Maintain good posture. Sit with your back straight, feet flat on the floor, and screen at eye level. Poor posture causes pain and fatigue that shortens your sessions and slows your learning curve.
• Practice in the morning when possible. Motor skill practice done before other heavy cognitive tasks tends to stick more effectively. Even 10 focused minutes in the morning can outperform 30 minutes late at night.
• Never skip a day entirely. Even 5 minutes on a very busy day is better than nothing. The goal is to keep the habit alive and prevent muscle memory from fading between sessions.
• Be patient with regressions. Some days your typing will feel slower than usual. Fatigue, stress, and illness all affect fine motor performance. Do not judge your overall trajectory by a single bad session. Keep showing up.

How Long Does It Actually Take to Improve?

This is the question everyone wants answered honestly. The truth: it depends on your starting point, how consistently you practice, and how quickly you drop bad habits. But here are realistic timelines based on common starting levels:

• Starting at 20–30 WPM: With daily practice, you can realistically reach 50–60 WPM in 6 to 8 weeks.
• Starting at 40–50 WPM: Reaching 70 WPM typically takes 4 to 8 weeks if you fix technique and practice consistently every day.
• Starting at 60–70 WPM: Breaking into the 80–90+ WPM range usually takes 2 to 3 months of deliberate, targeted practice on weak areas.
• Starting at 80+ WPM: At this level, gains come more slowly. Reaching 100+ WPM requires very focused drills on specific key combinations and sustained, months-long practice.

The single biggest variable in all of these is consistency. People who practice 10 minutes every day outperform people who practice 2 hours once a week — every single time, without exception.

Final Thoughts: Your Typing Speed Journey Starts Now

Improving your typing speed is one of the highest-return skills you can develop as a modern professional, student, or creator. The time you invest in it pays back every single day — in every document you write, every message you send, every line of code you type. Over a full career, a fast typist saves hundreds of hours compared to a slow one. That is time you get back to do work that actually matters.

The steps in this guide are not complicated. They require no special equipment, no expensive courses, and no rare talent. They require only three things: the willingness to practice with intention, the patience to rebuild habits correctly, and the consistency to show up every day.

Start today — not tomorrow, not next week. Measure your current baseline speed, apply the technique from this guide, and check your progress again in 30 days. The improvement you see will motivate you to keep going.

Take your first step right now.
Head to Funtwitch Typing, take a free typing speed test, and find out exactly where you stand today. Bookmark it, make it part of your daily routine, and watch your WPM climb week by week. Your future self — the one typing at 90 WPM effortlessly — will be grateful you started today.