Websites to practice touch typing:
Touch typing or typing without looking at the keyboard is a very useful skill. It not only saves your time, but it can greatly improve your overall productivity. Whether you're doing research for your studies or just have to do a lot of typing for work, touch typing is a great self-improvement skill that you should consider adding to your repertoire.
So let's take a look at some of the best websites to improve your typing speed and accuracy:
Best Websites to Learn Typing:
1. Typing.com
If you're starting to learn how to type without looking at the keyboard, this is one of the best websites to get started.
There are separate lessons for beginners where they teach you the basics of touch typing like J, F and space keys and lessons for stretching out and reaching out for more keys on the keyboard, from the home row (the middle row).
Once you complete the beginner lessons, you can move on to the Intermediate section. It focuses on typing common English words, Easy top row words, middle row (home row) words and some easy bottom row words.
After mastering the words, try typing complete sentences along with punctuations and different speed drills which are also available in the intermediate section.
The Advanced section will help you to learn to type numbers, letters, the numeric keypad, advanced symbols of the keyboard and will focus on developing your typing accuracy. Once you improve your typing accuracy, then you can focus on increasing speed.
There are many timed tests available on the "Tests" section of the website. A one minute test, three minute test and also a five minute test.
There are also full page tests like a complete 1 page test, 2 page test and a 3 page test which will definitely help you become a master of typing if you practice them daily.
2. Ratatype
On Ratatype, you will find many typing tests along with typing tutors. The "Learn" section outlines a few guidelines that you can follow to touch type. But keep in mind, it's always better to practice daily and without trying to follow a lot of rules. Some of the best typists, like Sean Wrona, don't follow the common rules of touch typing. He uses his own technique of finger placement.
But for starting out, it's better to follow the normal placement. By not following rules, I mean the ones which you can even skip and doesn't matter a lot like sitting completely straight. You can try variations and sometimes be in a full relax mode and type away.
It's all about how much you enjoy typing and that will increase your speed. Trying to follow a ton of rules will only make the process of learning to touch type and increasing speed more difficult and will make you feel like it's some kind of hard work.
To get certified, go to the "Typing Test" link and click on "Take a Typing Test". The certificate can also be downloaded to your device. The "Typing tutor" section consists of typing lessons of different rows of the keyboard.
3. Typing Club
This website has a huge collection of high quality typing lessons. The lessons are divided into many types - Home Row lessons, Top Row Lessons, Bottom Row Lessons, Tricky words, combinations of sentences and words, numbers, symbols, capitalization.
Make sure to complete all the lessons to becoming a typing expert, especially the nine stages of advanced lessons. All the lessons of Typing Club are assisted with a visual keyboard guide for finger placement on the rows of the keyboard.
If you want, you can also replay the lesson or retake the lesson to better improve your typing skills.
In between the typing tests, it also provides fun games and informative videos for improving your typing skills.
Websites to improve typing speed:
4. Monkey Type
Monkey Type has different categories for touch typing like timed tests where the time option can be changed according to your preferences. At the time of writing this post, there are four selections for timing - a 15 second test, a 30 second test, a 60 second test and a 120 second test.
There are also other interesting categories for improving typing speed -
(a) Words - You can select the number of words for your test. Options available are 10 words, 20 words, 50 words and 100 hundred words. In this test, there is no time limit.
(b) Quotes - By selecting this option, you can type out various quotes of different lengths - short, medium, long, thicc or mixed length if you select the "all" option.
(c) Custom - This is a very unique feature which can be rarely seen on other websites. By going to this "Custom" option, you can paste your own custom words and text for typing practice.
Try adding words that you find difficult to type, tricky words with a lot of punctuation, numbers and symbols and those words that you frequently type with errors.
In addition, for time-based tests and word tests, you can turn on the punctuation and numbers option to include numbers and punctuation in your tests. You can also turn them off if you prefer.
5. Keymash
Keymash is a new website and they aim to take your typing skills to the next level! It has a nice design with a dark background to make it easier on the eyes at night. Even though the other typing websites don't have a dark mode, you can use the Dark Reader extension to use dark mode on any website.
To get started learning the basics, go to the "School" tab. It has many lessons focused on the home row, top row, bottom row and even special lessons for each finger like the index finger, middle finger, ring finger and the pinky finger.
There are also other modes in the practice section like random words, words from the dictionary and quotes from movies, songs and more.
The leaderboards are also categorized into four types - By speed, by levels, by playtime and by the number of wins. So even if you're new to touch typing and currently have a low speed, you can still make it to the top scoreboards in the other categories if you type every single day.
6. Keybr
What differentiates Keybr from other sites is that it does not provide you with the same characters for beginners. Instead, it uses algorithms to automatically generate typing lessons according to your skills by detecting from your typing sessions.
It also collects statistics like your typing speed for each individual key and uses this data to generate unique words putting emphasis on your weakest keys, so that after a lot of practice, you'll no longer make any errors on those words and characters.
Instead of providing you with random words to type, Keybr has a unique style of creating typing lessons. By gathering data from the previous lessons by looking at your errors, it will create the new lesson accordingly. The algorithm will place the letter that you frequently misspell in every word in the coming lessons.
7. Keyhero
Keyhero is a great choice if you love to type quotes. In the "Quotes" section, you can find various quotes related to many topics ranging from movies to music or random quotes submitted by random people.
You can even submit your own quotes. The quote submitted will be made public and is viewable by everyone. Quotes can be also sorted from best to worst. The worst section usually contains quotes which are just submitted for the sake of submitting and doesn't provide much value to the typist. It can contain random letters and words or pieces of texts which make no sense at all.
If you're interested in more typing related discussions, you can join the forums. The typing tests provided by Keyhero generally focus on a mix of random words and phrases. Your current and average speed and accuracy will be shown on the right side of the test.
If you're new to touch typing or just want to go over the basics again, you can complete the "Typing Lesson" on Keyhero. As opposed to the typing tests, it will only contain characters and words to get your basics right.
The Typing Lesson part also contains practice lessons for numbers which also includes operators and symbols like "+" "/" etc.
Even when we're able to type completely without looking at the keyboard, we should practice typing lessons for beginners like the ones on Keyhero from time to time to improve our accuracy and rhythm.
There is also an "Instant Death" typing test on Keyhero. This test will not allow you to make even a single typing mistake, so it is a great way for improving accuracy.
Websites for typing races (To become an expert):
8. TyprX
TyprX is the official website used for the Ultimate Typing Championship typing competition. You can create private races or type as a guest racer. But it's better to create an account to keep track of your progress.
The leaderboards display the fastest typists in the last 24 hours as well as all time fastest typists.
9. Nitro Type
Nitro Type is another real-time typing race website. If you are into typing races and competitions, this is one of the best sites around. It is loaded with many features and cool stuff like the ability to buy cars with the money earned from typing races.
You can also unlock various achievements and titles by completing races and participating in various events organized by Nitro Type.
10. Typeracer
Typeracer completely redesigned its website this month. Now it has a more clean look and feel. This website is used by beginners as well as experts since it offers a variety of random paragraphs for typing, mostly from books and sometimes songs or other quotes.
11. 10fastfingers
This is a great website for improving typing speed. Even though it doesn't display the texts in a racing format, it provides the feature of real-time competitions. You can access it by going to the "Competitions" tab.
Unlike other websites, 10fastfingers offers typing tests and competitions in many languages, not just in the English language. So if you want to improve your typing speed in other languages also, make sure to try out the variety of different languages that 10fastfingers has to offer.
It also has many other categories for typing like the custom word mode, multiplayer mode and the top 1000 words feature where you can type all the top one thousand words of the English language to improve speed and accuracy for daily typing purposes.
The typing tests are divided into two sections -
Normal typing test - It includes easy to type words with no capitalization. You'll usually get to type words that are shorter in length if you choose this mode.
Advanced typing mode - This includes words that are a bit longer than the ones in the normal mode and also includes words with capital letters. If you practice the advanced test daily, you'll become an expert in no time.
In the "Text Practice Mode", you can submit your own texts for typing, type texts submitted by other people and even favorite them for future typing if you really like a particular piece of text.
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