How to Type Faster — 30-Day Plan to 80 WPM
The average adult types around 40 words per minute (WPM). Professional typists, software engineers, and journalists average 60-90 WPM. World-record holders type 200+. If you can already touch-type but want to break 60 WPM, here’s a 30-day plan that actually works.
Step 1: Get a baseline
Take a typing test. Use our typing test at 60 seconds. Don’t try hard — type at your natural pace. Record your WPM and accuracy. If you’re below 35 WPM or under 95% accuracy, you have a technique problem; the rest of this guide will help.
Step 2: Fix your home row
Touch typing means your fingers always return to the home row: ASDF for left hand, JKL; for right hand. Your wrists should not move. Your eyes should not look at the keyboard.
Almost everyone develops slight “hunt and peck” tendencies — looking at the keyboard for unusual letters like Q, Z, X. The fastest way to fix this: cover your keyboard with a cloth for 7 days. You’ll make 30% more mistakes but you’ll triple your speed by week 3.
Step 3: The bigram drill
Type “the” 50 times. Then “and” 50 times. Then “ing” 50 times. These are the three most common 3-letter sequences in English. By repeating them, you build muscle memory for the most common finger transitions.
Top typists don’t read individual letters; they read words and let muscle memory handle the keystrokes. The bigram drill builds the muscle memory.
Step 4: Slow down to speed up
This is counterintuitive but it works. For 7 days, type at 80% of your max speed but aim for 100% accuracy. After 7 days you’ll be typing faster than before, with fewer mistakes.
Speed comes from accuracy. Mistakes cost you 2 keystrokes (one to make the mistake, one to backspace). At 60 WPM with 95% accuracy, you’re effectively at 54 WPM in real-world output. At 50 WPM with 100% accuracy, you’re at 50 WPM real-world. So fix the accuracy first.
Step 5: Mix text types
If you only practice on standard prose, you’ll only get fast at standard prose. If you write code, practice on code (lots of symbols, lots of {}). If you write reports, practice on long-form text.
Our typing test has three text modes: common words (general practice), famous quotes (long-form prose), and tech vocabulary (code-like). Rotate through all three.
Step 6: The 30-day commitment
Type for 10 minutes a day for 30 days. Not 60 minutes once a week — 10 minutes daily. The brain consolidates motor skills during sleep, so spreading practice across days produces dramatically more improvement than batched sessions.
Expect: week 1 — slow, painful, lots of mistakes. Week 2 — speed flattens, accuracy improves. Week 3 — you’ll suddenly find you’re 5 WPM faster than your baseline. Week 4 — that speed stabilises.
What kind of keyboard?
Doesn’t matter as much as people say. Mechanical keyboards are nice but membrane keyboards are fine. The main physical thing that matters: key travel (how far the key moves before registering). Lower travel = faster, but harder on your fingers over long sessions.
Apple’s butterfly keyboards (2015-2019) were so flat that typists hated them. Newer Apple keyboards (2020+) have more travel and are fine.
Beyond 80 WPM
Past 80 WPM you stop being limited by mechanical speed and start being limited by reading speed. To get to 100+ WPM you have to develop the ability to read 4-5 words ahead while typing the current word. This is called “buffering” and it’s the same skill that simultaneous interpreters use.
Practice this with longer texts. Read the next sentence ahead while typing the current one. Most people can learn this in 2-3 weeks of deliberate practice.
Take the test
Track your progress on our typing test. Best WPM is saved across sessions.
