Measure your words per minute, find your worst keys and fix them — free, no signup
This page has a typing speed test, a typing accuracy drill and a numeric keypad drill, all free and all instant. The number that matters is not the one most people chase: a fast typist who backspaces constantly is slower in practice than a steady one who does not, which is why accuracy is tracked alongside speed everywhere here.
A word, for typing measurement, is five characters including spaces. That convention is what makes words per minute comparable across different passages — without it, a passage of short words would inflate your score.
Around 40 WPM is the figure usually quoted for an average adult typist, with professional typists well above that. Methodologies differ enough between tests — especially in how they handle corrections — that comparing scores across sites is unreliable.
Net WPM subtracts errors; gross WPM does not. A test that reports a flattering number is usually reporting gross. Ours reports both speed and accuracy so you can see the trade you are making.
Every error costs a backspace, a retype and a break in flow. That is typically several times the time the original keystroke took, which is why a 70 WPM typist at 92% accuracy is often slower in real work than a 60 WPM typist at 98%.
Above 97% accuracy is a reasonable working target for continuous prose. Below 95%, correction time starts to dominate and raw speed stops mattering.
The fastest route to more accuracy is deliberately slowing down until you are accurate, then letting the speed come back. It always does, and the accuracy usually stays.
Touch typing is the single largest factor in both speed and accuracy, and it is learnable at any age. If you look at your hands, that is the thing to fix before anything else.
Most people have two or three keys responsible for a disproportionate share of their errors. Key Accuracy reports which are yours; drilling those specifically is far more productive than general practice.
Posture matters more than people expect. Wrists up rather than resting, elbows at roughly a right angle, screen at eye level. Anchored wrists force finger stretching, and stretching is where substitution errors come from.
Numeric entry is a separate skill. If you do data entry, Number Typing drills the keypad, and being fast at prose predicts keypad speed poorly.
Weekly, not daily. Day-to-day variation is large enough that daily testing mostly measures your mood, and watching a noisy number every day is discouraging for no reason.
Practise between tests on the specific keys the test flagged. Testing is measurement; the improvement happens in the drills.
Around 40 WPM is commonly quoted as average for an adult, with professionals well above that. Because tests differ in how they handle corrections, compare against your own history rather than across sites.
Yes — free, no signup, no download, and you can retake it as often as you like.
Five characters including spaces. That standard is what makes WPM comparable between different passages.
In real work, yes. For a raw speed measure, corrections cost time — which is exactly why accuracy matters so much for your effective speed.
Accuracy first, then speed. Learn to touch type, stop looking at your hands, and drill your three worst keys specifically. Speed reliably follows accuracy; the reverse rarely works.