How to Improve Your Typing Speed: Games and Tips

Whether you're a student writing essays, a professional sending emails all day, or a gamer who needs to type quickly in chat, your typing speed matters more than you think. The average person types around 40 WPM (words per minute), but with the right practice, you can double or even triple that.

Here's a complete guide to improving your typing speed — with practical tips, effective exercises, and free typing games that make practice genuinely fun.

Why Typing Speed Matters

Before diving into the how, let's talk about the why:

• Productivity: A person who types 80 WPM instead of 40 WPM finishes typing tasks in half the time. Over a career, that adds up to thousands of hours saved.
• Flow state: When you can type as fast as you think, writing becomes more fluid. You spend less time hunting for keys and more time focusing on your ideas.
• Communication: Faster typing means quicker responses in chats, emails, and messages — making you a more effective communicator.
• Career advantage: Many jobs require strong typing skills. Data entry, programming, journalism, customer support, and administrative roles all benefit from speed and accuracy.

Test Your Current Speed

Before you start improving, you need a baseline. Take a WPM test to see where you stand:

Typing Speed on PlayBrain gives you a quick, accurate measurement of your words per minute and accuracy. Take the test 3 times and use your best score as your starting point. Here's how typical scores break down:

• Under 30 WPM: Beginner — lots of room to grow
• 30-50 WPM: Average — you can get by, but faster is better
• 50-70 WPM: Above average — you're ahead of most people
• 70-100 WPM: Fast — you're a proficient typist
• 100+ WPM: Expert — you're in the top tier

No matter where you start, you can improve significantly with focused practice.

Tip 1: Learn Proper Finger Placement

The foundation of fast typing is touch typing — using all 10 fingers with each finger assigned to specific keys. If you're currently a "hunt and peck" typist using just 2-4 fingers, learning proper placement will transform your speed.

Home row position:

• Left hand: A (pinky), S (ring), D (middle), F (index)
• Right hand: J (index), K (middle), L (ring), ; (pinky)
• Both thumbs rest on the space bar

Key principles:

• Each finger is responsible for a specific column of keys
• Your index fingers handle two columns each (the home column plus the one toward the center)
• Always return your fingers to the home row after pressing a key
• The bumps on the F and J keys help you find home position without looking

It feels slow and awkward at first. Your speed will temporarily drop. That's normal — push through it, and within a few weeks, you'll be faster than you ever were with hunt-and-peck.

Tip 2: Stop Looking at the Keyboard

This is the hardest habit to break, but it's essential. Looking at the keyboard forces your brain to do extra work — finding the key visually, then moving your finger to it, then looking back at the screen to check what you typed.

How to break the habit:

• Cover your keyboard with a cloth or a keyboard cover with blank keys
• Put a sticky note over your hands while typing
• Practice typing common words with your eyes closed
• Trust the home row bumps on F and J to keep your fingers oriented

Typing Speed is excellent for this — the words appear on screen, and you need to type them without looking down. The game naturally trains your eyes to stay on the screen.

Tip 3: Look Ahead While Typing

Fast typists don't look at the word they're currently typing — they look at the next word. This gives their brain time to prepare for upcoming keystrokes while their fingers finish the current word.

How to practice looking ahead:

• While typing a sentence, focus your eyes one word ahead of your fingers
• Start slowly and gradually increase speed
• With practice, you'll find your fingers "know" what to type while your eyes are already reading ahead

This technique alone can boost your speed by 10-20 WPM once it becomes automatic.

Tip 4: Practice With Typing Games

Drills are effective, but games make practice fun — and fun practice is practice you'll actually stick with. Here are the best games for building typing speed:

Typing Speed

Typing Speed is your core training tool. Take the WPM test daily to track your progress. Try to beat your personal best each session. The immediate feedback on speed and accuracy helps you identify areas for improvement.

Word Guess

Word Guess doesn't measure typing speed directly, but it builds a crucial supporting skill: word pattern recognition. The better you are at recognizing common letter patterns and word structures, the faster your brain can anticipate keystrokes. Plus, expanding your vocabulary helps you type unfamiliar words more confidently.

Crossword

Crossword requires you to type answers quickly and accurately. Because you're typing individual words in response to clues, it trains your brain to recall and type words rapidly. The time pressure adds an element of speed training to a classic word puzzle.

Spell Bee

Spell Bee improves your spelling accuracy, which directly translates to fewer typing errors. When you can spell words correctly without hesitation, you eliminate the backspace-and-retype cycles that destroy your effective WPM. Finding words from a set of letters also strengthens the mental connections between letters and words.

Tip 5: Focus on Accuracy First, Then Speed

This is counterintuitive, but slowing down to type accurately is the fastest path to improving your speed. Here's why:

• Every error requires you to stop, backspace, and retype — costing far more time than typing slightly slower would have
• Practicing errors reinforces bad muscle memory, making those mistakes harder to fix later
• Accuracy builds the correct neural pathways that speed eventually flows through

The rule: If your accuracy drops below 95%, slow down until it's consistently above 95%, then gradually push for more speed.

Tip 6: Practice Common Words and Letter Combinations

The English language is predictable. The 100 most common words make up about 50% of all written text. Mastering these words at full speed gives you a huge boost:

• Most common words: the, be, to, of, and, a, in, that, have, I, it, for, not, on, with, he, as, you, do, at
• Common letter pairs: th, he, in, er, an, re, on, at, en, nd, ti, es, or, te, of
• Common endings: -tion, -ing, -ment, -ness, -able, -ous

Practice typing these words and patterns until they become automatic — your fingers should know them by muscle memory.

Tip 7: Practice Daily (Even Just 10 Minutes)

Consistency beats intensity when it comes to building typing speed. Here's a practical daily routine:

1. Warm up (2 minutes): Type a few sentences at a comfortable speed to get your fingers moving
2. WPM test (3 minutes): Take 2-3 rounds on Typing Speed and record your best score
3. Focused practice (5 minutes): Work on your weakest area — maybe it's capital letters, numbers, or specific letter combinations
4. Cool down (2 minutes): Play a round of Word Guess or Spell Bee for fun

That's just 12 minutes, and if you do it daily, you'll see noticeable improvement within 2-3 weeks.

Tracking Your Progress

Improvement is motivating, but only if you can see it. Here's how to track your typing progress:

• Take the WPM test at the same time each day — morning scores and evening scores can differ
• Record both speed AND accuracy — improving one at the expense of the other isn't real progress
• Set milestone goals: 40 WPM → 50 WPM → 60 WPM → 70 WPM → 80 WPM
• Celebrate improvements — even 5 WPM faster is a meaningful gain

Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Practicing bad habits — if you're reinforcing hunt-and-peck or incorrect finger placement, you're making things worse. Fix your form first.
• Ignoring accuracy — speed without accuracy is just fast errors. Always keep accuracy above 95%.
• Skipping warm-ups — cold fingers are slow fingers. Always warm up before testing your speed.
• Practicing once a week — sporadic practice doesn't build muscle memory. Daily practice, even for 10 minutes, is far more effective.
• Getting frustrated — progress isn't linear. Some days you'll be slower than others. Focus on the long-term trend, not daily fluctuations.

The Bottom Line

Improving your typing speed is one of the most practical skills you can develop. It saves time every single day, makes writing more enjoyable, and gives you an edge in school, work, and online communication.

The formula is simple: learn proper finger placement, practice daily with a mix of tests and games, focus on accuracy first, and be patient. Most people can go from average (40 WPM) to fast (70+ WPM) within a few months of consistent practice.

Start with a free WPM test on Typing Speed and see where you stand. Then come back tomorrow and beat your score.

Practice typing and 50+ other skills with free games at PlayBrain.