A Faster, Lighter Keyboard Test

Welcome to the new and improved key-test.com. If you have visited before, the page will look familiar. What has changed is how it feels: it opens faster, the keys respond sooner when you type, and a few things that had quietly broken are working again. Here is a plain-language tour of what we did and why.

What's new in short

• Fewer ads, faster pages. We cut back on advertising and made the remaining ad slots lighter, so the tester appears sooner and nothing jumps around while the page settles.
• A keyboard that keeps up with you. The on-screen keys now light up more quickly and stay smooth even during fast typing.
• Small fixes. The key sound effects are back, along with a handful of other tidy-ups you can read about below.

Fewer ads, faster loading

Ads keep key-test.com free, and they are not going away. But we had let too many of them onto the page, and some of them were slow. Every extra ad is one more thing your browser has to fetch before it can get on with the job you came for.

So we trimmed. There are fewer ad units on each page now, and the ones that remain have a fixed place and size. That last part matters more than it sounds: previously an ad could load late and push the keyboard down the page just as you started typing. Now the space is reserved in advance, so the keyboard stays exactly where it is.

Behind the scenes, the scripts that measure how the site performs also wait their turn. They only load once the page is ready and you have started using it, so they never compete with the tester for your attention or your bandwidth.

A keyboard that keeps up with you

The heart of the site is the virtual keyboard that lights up as you press real keys. We rebuilt the way each key animates when it is pressed. The visual effect is the same little "push down" you are used to, but the browser now does far less work to draw it.

In practice that means:

• Keys highlight a fraction sooner after you press them.
• Holding several keys at once, for example to check key rollover or ghosting, stays smooth instead of stuttering.
• Resizing your browser window no longer makes the whole keyboard flicker while it adjusts.

Nothing about the measurements changed. The key counter, the actions-per-minute readout and the keyboard heatmap still record every press exactly as before. If you want a pure speed challenge, the Keyboard CPS Test measures keys per second on any key or combination of keys.

Small fixes and quiet improvements

• Sound effects play again. The optional key sounds above the keyboard (typewriter, mouse click, meow, quack and pistol) had gone silent after an earlier update. They work now. If you still hear nothing, make sure the tab is not muted and press a key first, since browsers only allow sound after you interact with the page.
• A clearer changelog. Site updates used to be tucked away at the bottom of the home page. They now live on their own changelog page, available in every language, with the three most recent entries still shown on the home page.
• Easier language switching. Every page now has a language selector at the bottom of the footer, so you can jump to the same page in any of our 32 languages.
• A note on translations. Our team writes and maintains the English pages directly. Translated pages now carry a short note linking to the English version, so if anything ever reads differently you know which one to trust.
• This blog. You are reading the first post. We will use this space for updates like this one, written for people rather than for machines.

Try it out

1. Open the keyboard tester and type a sentence as fast as you can. The highlighted keys should keep pace with you.
2. Hold Shift, W and A together. All three should stay lit without any hesitation.
3. Pick a sound from the Sound menu above the keyboard and press a few keys.
4. Scroll to the bottom of any page and try the new language selector.

Tell us what you think

If something feels off after this update, the Comments button in the navigation bar goes straight to us. And if you have an idea for what we should improve next, we would love to hear it. Thanks for using key-test.com.