Most typing speed plateaus aren't caused by a lack of finger speed — they're caused by bad habits that add invisible milliseconds to every keystroke. Fixing these habits often produces bigger speed gains than any amount of raw practice, because you're removing the friction that makes speed improvements impossible in the first place. Here are the ten most common mistakes, roughly ordered from most impactful to least, with specific fixes for each.
1. Looking at the Keyboard
Every glance at the keyboard adds 200–400 ms of delay because your eyes have to travel from the screen to the keys, find the target key, watch your finger move to it, and then return to the screen to check the result. Over a full paragraph, this adds up to seconds of wasted time. Worse, it means you can't see your errors until after you look back up, so mistakes pile up undetected. Fix: cover your keyboard with a cloth or use a blank keycap set and force yourself to type by feel. The first few days will be painful, but your brain will map the key positions into muscle memory far faster when it has no visual crutch to fall back on.
2. Using Too Few Fingers
Many self-taught typists use four to six fingers and compensate with speed and familiarity. This works up to about 60 WPM, but creates a hard ceiling because some fingers are handling two or three times their fair share of keys. When a word requires rapid alternation between keys assigned to the same overloaded finger, that finger physically can't move fast enough. Fix: learn proper ten-finger home-row placement. Yes, your speed will drop temporarily. Within two to four weeks it will recover, and within two months you'll be faster than you were before.
3. Over-Using Backspace
Every backspace press costs roughly the same time as three correct keystrokes: the recognition that an error occurred, the movement to the Backspace key, the press itself, and then retyping the correct character. High-error typists can spend 20–30% of their total keystrokes on corrections. Fix: prioritise accuracy over speed. Drop your target WPM by 10–15 and focus on clean input. Your net speed (correctly typed characters per minute) will actually increase because you're eliminating the backspace tax.
4. Bottoming Out Keys
Pressing keys all the way to the bottom of their travel wastes energy and time. The keypress registers at the actuation point, which is typically halfway down. Everything past that point is wasted motion that your finger then has to undo on the upstroke. Fix: practise a lighter touch. Imagine the keys are hot and you want to touch them as briefly as possible. Mechanical keyboards with tactile switches help because the bump gives you physical feedback at the actuation point.
5. Inconsistent Hand Position
If your fingers drift away from the home row and don't return between words, you lose your spatial reference and start mistyping keys that are half a key width off from where you think they are. Fix: after every word or pause, consciously return your index fingers to the F and J keys (which have tactile bumps for exactly this purpose). Make it a reflex.
6. Tensing Your Hands and Wrists
Tension is the enemy of speed in any motor skill. Tight muscles move slower than relaxed muscles, and sustained tension causes fatigue that degrades performance over a session. Many typists unconsciously clench their hands, raise their wrists, or hunch their shoulders while typing fast. Fix: periodically check your hands during typing. Shake them out between paragraphs. Keep your wrists floating or resting lightly — never pressing hard against the desk edge.
7. Not Practising Weak Keys
Everyone has keys that cause hesitation: the number row, punctuation, or uncommon letters. If you never specifically target these keys, they remain permanent speed bumps. Fix: identify your worst three keys by paying attention to where you pause or mistype. Spend five minutes at the start of each practice session drilling words that use those keys heavily.
8. Ignoring Punctuation and Capitals
Many typists practise only on lowercase letters and freeze when they encounter a capital letter, comma, apostrophe, or quotation mark. In real typing, punctuation appears in roughly every other word. Fix: always practise with real prose that includes full punctuation. The Typing Speed Test uses real sentences specifically for this reason.
9. Starting Without a Warm-Up
Cold fingers and an unfocused brain produce slower, sloppier typing. Jumping straight into a speed test without warming up gives you a result 5–10 WPM below your actual capability. Fix: spend two minutes typing at 60–70% effort before any timed session. This primes your finger coordination and focuses your attention.
10. Practising Tired
Motor learning consolidates during rest, not during exhaustion. Practising when you're mentally fatigued builds sloppy patterns into muscle memory and produces artificially low scores that hurt your motivation. Fix: keep practice sessions under 20 minutes, and schedule them when you're alert — mornings or after a break, not at the end of a long day.
Identify which of these habits are holding you back on the Typing Speed Test.