How to improve your typing speed
Speed on SumnuTyping is a count of correct characters over time. It moves when your fingers know where the next key is and you stop spending a quarter-second on a search. It does not move because a settings panel was flipped, and it does not move because you once hit a high number on a 15-second test while missing every fourth letter. The home page already sketches this in short form. This guide is the version you can follow for two weeks without inventing a new routine each morning.
Most adults who type for work and have never practiced land somewhere in a broad middle band. People who write or code all day often sit higher, and a few dedicated typists sit much higher. Those bands are described in What is WPM. Where you start matters less than whether this week’s 60-second test is more accurate than last week’s. A cleaner 55 is progress. A wild 80 with a trail of red characters is a different activity.
Give every finger a key and then stop negotiating
Touch typing means the finger for a key is decided in advance. The learn hub and the on-screen diagram already make those assignments for a QWERTY keyboard. Home row is A S D F and J K L semicolon. Reaches go up to the top row and down to the bottom row, and the finger comes back. If you currently type quickly with four fingers and a lot of looking, you will get slower the week you switch. That slowdown is the cost of replacing a search with a map. Keep the eyes on the words. Every look down restarts the search and cancels the repetition you just paid for.
Do not “mostly” follow the diagram. The failure mode is a private exception list: “I use my index finger for B, and also for C when I am tired, and also for X.” The exceptions are the words you miss. Pick the assigned finger, including on the days it feels fussy. Fifteen quiet minutes beat an hour of bargaining with yourself.
Use the tool that matches the problem
If you do not yet know which finger owns a row, you do not have a speed problem. You have a lesson problem. Stay inside home row, then top row, then bottom row, and only then the full alphabet. The software unlocks them in that order in this browser. Respect the order even if you can already peck out an email.
When the letters are in your hands, measure with Practice. Timed at 60 seconds is the score to write down. Fifteen seconds is a warm-up, not a personal best you should remember. Two minutes is a check that you can hold the same accuracy after the novelty wears off. Words mode is the calmer sibling: no clock, the passage ends when the words end, and the formula is the same. Use it when a countdown makes you mash. Code mode, and the separate Code level inside Timed or Words, exist so programmers meet braces and keywords. They are not a smarter way to learn A S D F.
Games belong after the measurement, not instead of it. Word Fall punishes a look down because the word keeps falling. Survival punishes a hesitant word because the bar runs out. Type Racer makes you type the correct character before you may continue, which the practice test does not. Rotate them so practice is not only one kind of pressure. If a game score rises while 60-second accuracy stays poor, ignore the game score until the test is clean.
The 95 percent line
The home page tells you to slow down when accuracy drops below 95 percent. Here is how to apply that without turning it into a mood. After a Timed test, look at accuracy before WPM. At 95 or above, you may try a slightly faster next run, or one step up in the level menu, from Easy toward Medium. Under 95, the next run is slower on purpose, or it is the same text’s lesson again. Do not “make up for it” by immediately taking another test at the same pace. That is how a bad habit gets a second rehearsal.
Why this cut and not 100 percent? A perfect run at a crawl does not prepare you for a real paragraph, and a run full of errors inflates nothing but the error counter. This site’s practice test marks a miss and moves on. You are not required to repair the character. That is generous to your WPM relative to a test where you must correct, and it is harsh on accuracy, which falls as soon as the miss happens. Keeping accuracy high is how you stop collecting misses you never felt.
Two weeks, written down
Week one is rows and Easy. Each day, about fifteen minutes: a few minutes on the current lesson, one or two 60-second tests on Easy, and a short game only if the lesson was accurate. Stop when your hands feel hot or your shoulders have climbed toward your ears. Record the 60-second WPM and accuracy in your head or in the profile history. Auto-save will keep the test on this browser. Export a .sumnudata file if you want a copy that is not trapped in one browser. That file is your log. It is not an official transcript.
Week two adds pressure in small pieces. If Easy at 60 seconds is holding near 95 percent, move the level to Medium for one of the daily tests and keep one test on Easy so you still have a stable comparison. Add a Words passage twice in the week. Add numbers only after the alphabet lesson is honest. Add a two-minute Timed test once, not every day. If the two-minute accuracy collapses, you have your answer: the one-minute speed was a sprint you cannot yet repeat. Go back to one minute.
People who already type all day can invert the emphasis. Skip nothing if a particular row is still a look-down, but spend more of the fifteen minutes on Medium or Hard, on Code if you program, and on Type Racer’s ghost. The ghost is your own last Racer speed, stored locally. Beating it means something. Beating a 15-second fluke does not.
What will not raise the number
New keyboards, new themes, and a harder word list on day one do not install a finger map. Posting a single lucky test to rankings does not install it either. Rankings show scores people choose to submit. They are a public board, not a coach. Practicing once for an hour on Sunday and disappearing until next Sunday also fails, because the map is built by returning, not by exhausting yourself.
If something hurts, stop. This site is not a clinic and these guides are not treatment. Speed that arrives by grinding through pain is a bad trade. Come back when the hands are quiet. The drills will still be there, in the same order, with the same formula.
When you want the arithmetic behind the counter, use the WPM guide. When you want the reason to bother, use why typing speed matters. When you want to type, open a 60-second test or the lesson you are actually on.