In our digital era, touch typing is a crucial skill that enhances typing speed, efficiency, and accuracy. For a beginner or someone looking to refine their skills, these touch-typing websites are great places to improve as they offer features that enhance the learning experience and boost proficiency.
For in-depth lessons and practice sessions, this one stands out the best. It has a variety of learning and practice modes. The user interface is pretty decent and appealing enough to keep one engaged. Its strong suits are the typing courses and tests. For more efficient growth, this one is highly recommended. There are other features, like the games, to explore.
One thing that I particularly like about this typing website is that it observes your "weak keys" and provides a specialised practice session to develop those weak keys.
Monkeytype is a more modern-looking website that makes practicing really fluid. It does very well to record performances based on different types of tests. And the tests range between time, number of words, quotes, zen mode, where you type your own words, or even setting up a custom practice session for yourself.
My favourite thing about this one is that it does not only save your data but also provides the necessary graph and uses your data to assign Discord roles on their server. Yes, Monkeytype has a server, and there is an actual community with real people.
Similar to the previous, this one has a community of typers, but on its website and not on Discord. It's not as intricate, but there are leaderboards to rank on. My use case for this one is to compete with friends.
For some reason, many of the touch-typing websites I have explored do not have the feature of allowing people to compete with themselves in real-time over the internet. There are a few with something similar, but they connect people to random people—which could be bots, for all I know. Typer.io is the one that provides the facility to challenge my friends and compete with them.
Unlike typingtest.com, this one only provides facilities to practice, not typing courses as well. It is intuitive to use. It doesn't have the best-looking user interface, but it does the job just fine and is very responsive.
Personally, I have spent a large amount of my time practicing here. The only issue I have with it is that it can get plagued with ads, but that's not something a basic ad-blocker can't fix. Other than that, it is excellent for practice.
The results across these websites may vary based on their metrics and method of analysing data. It can be an advantage as it helps one have a pretty rough idea where they stand, as well as put one through different practice environments for a better learning experience.
In the future, hopefully, I'll share posts exploring each one of these websites, indicating their specs, pros, and cons.
Images are screenshots taken from the websites. Thumbnail designed with Canva