How to Increase Typing Speed: 9 Tips That Work

If you type at 40 words per minute, you're not slow. You're exactly average, and you've probably been stuck there for years. Here's the truth nobody sells you: there is no secret. Fast typists just built the right habits, most of them by accident over a decade. You can do it deliberately in about a month.

To increase typing speed, you need accuracy first, proper finger placement second, and deliberate practice third. Skip any one of those and you'll stay at 40 WPM forever. Let's fix that.

Rule one: accuracy before speed

This is the tip everyone ignores because it feels backwards. You want to go faster, so you type faster, make more mistakes, hammer backspace, and end up slower than when you started. Every correction costs you roughly twice the time the original keystroke did. The math is brutal and simple: 60 WPM at 85% accuracy loses to 45 WPM at 98% accuracy in any real task, because the second person never stops to fix things.

So slow down on purpose. Type at a pace where you almost never make mistakes, even if it feels slow for a week. Once 95% accuracy feels easy, nudge the pace up. Speed shows up on its own.

Relearn your finger placement (yes, really)

Most self-taught typists use four to six fingers and a lot of hand gymnastics. It works fine until about 40 WPM, then it hits a wall, because your fingers travel absurd distances. Proper touch typing keeps each finger near its home keys, with nothing traveling more than one key away.

Yes, relearning feels terrible for the first week. You'll type at 20 WPM and want to throw your keyboard. That's normal and temporary. Guided lessons that force you to use the right fingers, one row at a time, get you through it fastest.

The 9 tips

• Keep your wrists floating. Resting your wrists on the desk bends them upward and slows every finger. Hover slightly. It feels weird for two days, then it feels normal.
• Don't look at the keyboard. Drape a towel over your hands for ten minutes a day. Your accuracy will crater, then recover higher than before. This is the single highest-leverage habit on this list.
• Drill your worst keys, not random text. Everyone has three or four keys that betray them. Find yours with a key heatmap and drill just those for five minutes. Fixing weak keys is worth more than a hundred generic practice sessions.
• Practice in short daily bursts. Fifteen focused minutes beats a two-hour weekend marathon. Muscle memory consolidates between sessions, not during them.
• Use real words, not gibberish. Drills like "asdf jkl;" build finger memory, but real words build word memory. Your brain starts typing common words as single chunks, which is where real speed comes from.
• Stop correcting every tiny mistake mid-flow. In practice mode, finish the word first, then look back. Constant backspacing trains hesitation.
• Learn the opposite-hand Shift rule. Capital on the left side? Right Shift. Capital on the right? Left Shift. It saves a surprising amount of awkward pinky stretching.
• Fix your posture. Screen at eye level, elbows near 90 degrees, feet flat. Tension in your shoulders migrates straight to your fingers. If your neck hurts, your WPM is paying for it.
• Test yourself weekly, not daily. Daily testing turns practice into performance anxiety. Train all week, take one proper timed test on Sunday, and watch the number climb.

Why everyone plateaus at 40 WPM

The 40 WPM plateau is so common it should have a name. It happens because 40 WPM is what years of casual typing with bad habits gets you: looking at the keys, four fingers, constant corrections. Your brain optimized for "good enough" and stopped improving.

Breaking through requires doing something uncomfortable: getting temporarily worse. Relearning finger placement, stopping the key-peeking, drilling weak keys. All of it drops your speed for a week or two before it climbs past your old ceiling. Most people quit during the dip, which is why most people stay at 40. Push through the dip, and 60 WPM is sitting right there.

How long does it actually take?

Honest numbers: 40 to 60 WPM takes four to six weeks of daily 15-minute practice. 60 to 80 takes another two to three months. Past 80, progress slows to a crawl and stops mattering for real work.

This won't work if you practice once a week, or if you keep peeking at the keyboard during every session. Consistency beats intensity every single time. Fifteen minutes a day is a podcast episode's worth of time.

Frequently asked questions