If you're starting IELTS Reading preparation with little experience in academic English, a scattered mix of random practice tests usually leads to frustration rather than progress. A more structured approach — reading before drilling, and drilling before timing — gets better results in less time.
Before worrying about question types, get comfortable reading dense non-fiction English for 10-15 minutes a day. Pick beginner-level academic passages, read them fully, and try to summarize the main idea in one sentence afterward. This step alone fixes a problem most beginners don't realize they have: they've never actually built the habit of sustained academic reading in English.
Move to actual practice questions, but skip the clock entirely. Focus on Multiple Choice, Fill-in-the-Blank, and True/False/Not Given — these test direct comprehension and are the easiest starting point. After each attempt, read every explanation, including for questions you got right, so you understand why an answer works, not just that it does.
Once your untimed accuracy is consistently strong, introduce Matching Headings and Matching Information. These require understanding a paragraph's overall purpose rather than a single fact, so they're genuinely harder — don't feel discouraged if your accuracy drops when you start these.
Start with slightly generous time limits and tighten them toward the real 20-minutes-per-passage pace as your comfort grows. Timing too early, before comprehension is solid, usually just teaches panic rather than skill.
A score tells you how you did; reviewing wrong answers tells you why. Keep a simple log of which question types trip you up most, and weight your next practice sessions toward those.
This kind of structured, level-based progression — starting from Beginner passages and working up to Advance, with instant scoring and explanations at every step — is exactly what Readlify's practice library is built around.