The opener: coverage first
Your first guess has one job: find out which common letters are in the word and where. Five-letter English words lean hard on E, A, R, O, T, L, S, I and N, so openers built from those letters rate near the top in every computer analysis. SLATE, CRANE, TRACE, ROAST. SLATE in particular earns its reputation. S starts more five-letter words than any other letter and E ends more of them.
Vowel dumps like ADIEU are popular and a little weaker. You learn a lot about vowels, which are usually easy to work out anyway, and nothing about the consonants that actually separate one word from another. If ADIEU is your habit, keep it. Consistency helps more than the small difference. Just know the trade you're making.
The second guess is where most people stall
After the opener you have a choice. Chase the clues you found, or play a second word made of five new letters. When the opener gives you one yellow or nothing at all, a fresh-letter second word is almost always right. SLATE then CORNY, or SLATE then DOUGH, tests ten letters in two turns and usually leaves an easy third guess. Chasing a lone yellow right away tends to turn into a lucky dip among dozens of candidates.
The exception is two or more greens from the opener. The field is already narrow, so work inside the pattern. A good way to build the instinct: after a game, put your clues into the Wordle helper and see how many words actually fit at each stage. Replaying old games this way is the fastest trainer there is.
Think in positions, not letters
A yellow tells you two things. The letter is in the word, and it is not in the spot you tried. Say your R comes up yellow in position 2. Before you guess again, ask where R can still go. If your next guess puts R in position 2 again, you threw the clue away. Good players track ruled-out positions without thinking about it. Until it's automatic, do it on purpose.
Watch for doubles too. Wordle uses them a lot: THREE, BELLE, ARRAY. A gray on a letter you played twice only means the word doesn't have a second copy. Forget about doubles and words like FLOOR and SPELL cost you two extra guesses.
The endgame trap
The classic streak killer is a pattern with too many fillers. You've got _ATCH and you feel close. But BATCH, CATCH, HATCH, LATCH, MATCH, PATCH and WATCH all fit, and at one word per guess you can't test them all. The right move feels wrong: spend a turn on a word you know is not the answer but that tests several of the candidate letters at once. With three guesses left, playing CHOMP against _ATCH checks C, H, M and P in one go and usually leaves you certain.
This is exactly where hard mode hurts, since it forces you to reuse revealed clues and forbids the probing guess. Hard mode is good discipline. If the streak is what you care about, standard mode plus deliberate probing wins more games.
A realistic target
A decent opener and the fresh-letters second guess put most people around a 3.9 to 4.2 average. Add positional thinking and endgame probing and it usually drops under 3.8. The best solvers, human or machine, sit near 3.4. If you're finishing most days in four with the occasional five, you're already playing well. The gap between four and three is mostly the quality of that second guess.
Tools for practice: the Wordle Helper shows every word that matches your clues. More guides: two-letter Scrabble words, Q without U, the history of anagrams.