Your mood and environment greatly affect how quickly and efficiently you read. Read in a distraction-free environment to maintain focus. Make sure you have plenty of light, comfortable seating and a noise-free space to read. Wear earplugs or soundproof headphones if you cannot avoid noise. Removing distractions lets you pay more attention to the page and read faster. Read in the mornings or whenever you wake up. You're more focused and likely to retain information. Reading before bed or in bed will make you tired, especially at the end of the day.
Nearly everybody subvocalizes when they read, meaning they say the words in their head as they read. This slows down your reading because you can read only slightly faster than you can speak. Some people even mouth the words while they read. Eliminate subvocalization and simply read the words without pronouncing them in your mind.
Not all material is appropriate for skimming, but if you only need a cursory knowledge of information in a piece of writing, it can work. Skim the paragraphs in a Z pattern, starting at the left, moving right, then moving down and to the left then back to the right to look for keywords or phrases that relate to the information you need. Read the beginning of paragraphs to ascertain the contents of the passage, then decide if that information is relevant to you. If it's not important, skim or merely skip the paragraph to find more relevant or useful information.
Practice moving your eyes quickly over text, taking in blocks of words at a time rather than single words. If the sentence is, "The dog walked along the street looking for something," you don't have to read each word by itself. Break sentences into blocks or clusters like "the dog walked" and "along the street" to speed up your reading and comprehension. With practice, you can start to take in larger blocks of text at once. Sweep your eyes from left to right, following the blocks you're scanning.
Avoid regression by having to go back and reread sections. Learn to read words the first time rather than skipping them before you've read them. Any time you need to go back to reread something, you're slowing down your reading and losing focus. If you do miss a word or phrase, go back immediately. Don't wait until the end of the page or paragraph. Take an index card and guide it along the sentences as you read, blocking the previous words to prevent rereading.