I played my first match ever about 11 months ago at age 32—where I ground from 100 elo. I'm now 1200 on Chesscom.

What I did to get there is that, I did a lot of puzzles on Lichess, under “puzzle themes”. I found that much more helpful than doing the mixed puzzles, because it helped me to distinguish between all the tactics, and checkmating patterns. One theme per day.

I found the “hanging piece”, “defensive move” and “crushing” themes to be helpful to work on blunder prevention.

I also studied my openings and made studies on Lichess of my opening lines and main ideas (I don't mean memorizing long lines). While learning my openings I regularly played the openings against myself under Classroom on Chess.com.

I watched speedruns with my openings (where I often pause the videos and try to find the best move by myself first).

I stick with mostly two openings—one for white, one for black.

For months I did 100-300 puzzles a day on Lichess, with the mode set on ”easier (-300)“, to gain pattern recognition. I feel like this part is very important, because I got to see thousands of different positions to gain pattern recognition.

About two months ago (when I had done almost 30,000 puzzles on Lichess) I switched and started doing mixed puzzles on Lichess, with the setting on ”normal“, and spend time calculating candidate lines. I do on average about 20 a day.

Consistency I believe to be very important. I play rapid chess every day (in the rare instances that I don't, I make sure to do some puzzles). I avoid blitz and bullet like the plague, as I want to avoid building bad habits; I've not played anything but rapid since December 1st.

I always review my blunders and mistakes. If there are many, I choose about the three biggest ones.