How This Typing Test Works, and How to Get Faster With It
This test measures two things at once: how fast you type and how often you get it right. The timer starts on your first keystroke, not when the page loads, so you can settle your hands before you begin. Correct characters turn green, mistakes turn red, and the cursor stays put until you type the expected character or press Backspace.
Speed is reported in words per minute, where a "word" is five keystrokes — letters, digits, punctuation and spaces all count. That convention comes from typewriter-era standards and it is what makes scores comparable between tests and between languages. If you want the arithmetic behind the number, along with benchmarks by age and profession, the WPM test page covers it in detail.
The practical advice for improving is unglamorous: slow down. Accuracy compounds. Every uncorrected mistake costs you a character, and every corrected one costs you a Backspace plus the retype — so a single typo is roughly a three-keystroke penalty. Typists who hold 98% accuracy at 55 WPM almost always beat typists who hold 88% accuracy at 70 WPM on real work, because real work does not accept errors.
If particular keys keep letting you down, the problem may not be your fingers. A switch that fails to register intermittently reads exactly like a missed keystroke. Run the full keyboard test to confirm every key fires, and the double typing test if you are seeing doubled letters that you know you typed once.