1. Learn the home row properly, once
If you still look at the keyboard, nothing else on this page will help much. Cover your hands or use a blank keycap set for two weeks. Your speed will fall by half and then recover above where it started.
The goal is not memorising a diagram. It is building the reflex that the F and J bumps are where your index fingers live, so every other key can be found relative to them without sight.
2. Fix accuracy before chasing speed
Every error costs two keystrokes: the wrong character and the backspace. At 90% accuracy you are spending roughly a fifth of your keystrokes undoing work.
Practise at a pace where you finish a run above 97% accuracy. That pace will feel uncomfortably slow for about a week, and then it becomes your new baseline — and a faster one than before.
3. Use a metronome, not a stopwatch
Speed is rhythm. Set a metronome to a comfortable rate and try to type one word per beat, with no bursts and no stalls. Consistency is what makes a run feel effortless, and consistency is what a stopwatch cannot teach you.
When a run feels smooth from start to finish, raise the tempo by five beats per minute.
4. Practise in short daily sessions
Fifteen focused minutes a day beats two hours on Sunday. Motor learning consolidates between sessions, not during them. A daily 10-minute run also keeps the test conditions stable, which makes your own numbers comparable.
5. Read ahead, not at the cursor
Most hesitation is not finger speed, it is the eye arriving at the word you are already typing. Force your eyes one or two words ahead of your hands. The pause disappears almost immediately once you notice it.
6. Find the lag in your setup
- Browser extensions that highlight text on every keystroke can add tens of milliseconds.
- A wireless keyboard on a congested 2.4 GHz band drops keystrokes under load. Try a cable.
- Key repeat delay and a slow screen refresh both show up as "my hands are faster than my typing".
- If you use a non-QWERTY layout, be aware that most benchmarks assume QWERTY and your score will not be comparable.
7. Track one number at a time
Pick net WPM at 60 seconds. Improve accuracy. Then improve speed. Then improve consistency. Changing all three at once produces noise that looks like progress and is not.