Average clicks per second

Click-test websites give a range of clicks per second for an ordinary person, and one of them gives a range for each way of clicking. Another site lists the same ranges for three of the techniques, compiled from user reports and gaming forums. These are the ranges, all of them marked as what they are.

Each range is for one technique, so the first question to ask is not how many clicks per second people make but how you click. A person who clicks with one finger and a person who drags a finger across the button are doing two different things, and no single average can describe both.

A norm needs a named group of people, a known way of measuring and a count of how many took part. The site behind these ranges says it asked professional players, but it publishes neither its method nor its data, and it does not say how many people it asked. We cannot check where the numbers came from, so we do not treat them as an average of anyone.

That has a clear effect on what this site does. The CPS test never says you are faster than a share of people, and it never gives you a rank. Its first sentence sets your result beside what a site says of an ordinary person, the details draw the range for each technique as a dashed band labelled as a community range, and your own earlier results sit next to them.

Clicks per second depends on how long you click for. In a run of 1 sec you can burst: you click as hard as you can and never get tired. In a run of 100 sec you have to hold a pace, your hand slows and the number drops. The same person gets a higher figure from a short run than from a long one.

Many published ranges do not say how long the clicking lasted, which is one more reason to hold them loosely. When you compare two results of your own, use runs of the same length.

• The device: a mouse with a light button lets you click quicker than a stiff one, a trackpad may be slower, and a phone or a touch screen depends on how well it picks up quick taps.
• The way you click: one finger, two fingers in turn, or a technique that makes the button bounce.
• Warming up: your first run is often slower than your third.
• How the clicks are counted: a test that starts its clock with the first click gives a different number from one that starts with a countdown.

A run that is faster than one finger can click, or whose clicks are spaced exactly evenly like a machine's, is kept but not compared with anything on the CPS test. That is a statement about the run and not about you: it usually means several fingers were used.

Use the ranges as a rough picture of what people report for each technique, and your own results as the real yardstick. Take the test a few times on the same device with the same run length, and watch how your numbers move. That tells you more about your hand than any range on a website. The guide on how to click faster covers technique and how to look after your hand.