A click speed test site without a typing test always felt like it was missing something. Typing speed is one of the most searched-for benchmarks online, so this was an obvious addition — but building it for both desktop and mobile turned out to be two very different problems.
- Desktop typing test launched with two modes: Words (random common words) and Facts (type out interesting facts as sentences). You pick 15, 30, or 60 seconds, and it forces error correction — you can't skip past a mistake, you have to backspace and fix it. Live WPM counter updates as you type.
- A 20-level rank system gives you a label from "Hunt and Peck" at the bottom to "Transcendent" at the top. It's based on WPM thresholds and the average desktop typist sits around 40 WPM, so the ranks are calibrated to make most people feel like they're somewhere reasonable while still giving the fast typists something to chase.
- The mobile version needed completely different input handling. Mobile keyboards don't reliably fire keydown events, so it listens to input events on a hidden text field instead. Autocorrect and predictive text had to be disabled or they'd mess up the word matching. The first keystroke wasn't registering initially — turned out the input element needed a shared ref pattern to avoid a race condition on focus.
- Mobile rank thresholds are set much lower because thumb-typing on a phone is genuinely slower. Average mobile typing speed is about 25 WPM compared to 40 on desktop, so the whole scale shifts down. Same rank names, different numbers behind them.
- Leaderboard integration needed variants for every combination of mode and duration — Words 15s, Words 30s, Words 60s, Facts 15s, and so on. The leaderboard page got a typing-specific nav to filter between them. That's a lot of KV namespaces at this point.
- Two SEO content pages went in alongside it: a "What's a Good WPM Score?" benchmark guide and a "How to Type Faster" step-by-step tutorial. Both link back to the test itself and both have FAQPage schema for search.