Free typing progress tracker

A single typing result moves by several words per minute for reasons that have nothing to do with your typing: how warmed up you were, which words the prompt happened to draw, which keyboard you sat at. That variation is the reason a tracker is worth having at all. One result cannot tell you whether you are improving. A column of them can.

The practical consequence is that a three WPM gain between two runs is not a gain. It is inside the noise. What improvement actually looks like is the whole group of results shifting: your slow runs get less slow, and the range between your best and worst narrows. Watch the bottom of your range rather than the top, because your worst recent result is a better description of what you can rely on than your best one is. The exact sources of that variation are set out in how typing scores work.

Why progress stops, and what to do about it

Almost everyone who practises regularly hits a plateau, usually sooner than they expect, and it is rarely a motivation problem. It happens because you have automated the technique you currently use, and that technique has a ceiling. More repetition at the same pace rehearses the ceiling rather than raising it.

Breaking one means changing what you are practising, not how hard:

• Slow down deliberately. Run several sessions at a pace where you make almost no errors. Speed built on accuracy holds; accuracy retrofitted onto speed generally does not.
• Find the specific failures. Plateaus are usually a handful of letter pairs and reaches your hands avoid. Notice which words you stumble on rather than treating the whole keyboard as equally difficult.
• Stop looking down. If you glance at the keyboard for numbers or symbols, that glance is your ceiling, and no amount of practice at speed removes it.
• Practise the material you avoid. Repeating the mode you are already best at feels productive and moves nothing.

Three things worth tracking besides speed

Speed is the number people watch and the least informative one on its own. The history here records more than that, and three patterns in it are worth reading:

1. Whether accuracy holds as speed rises. If your WPM climbs while your accuracy falls, you have not got faster; you have started skipping the checking. That reverses under assessment pressure.
2. The gap between your short and long results. A large drop from one minute to five is a stamina problem rather than a speed one. A narrowing gap over weeks is real progress even when the headline figure has not moved.
3. Consistency between runs on the same day. A tight cluster means a technique you can depend on. A wide scatter means your good results are luck, and the number you should quote is nearer the bottom of it.

None of this requires an account, and none of it leaves your device — which also means the history exists only in the browser you built it in.