Ever since Medium popularized the concept of the read times on articles, I’ve been seeing it as a design element in more WordPress projects.
Getting a great estimate for average read time is complicated, but if you just need a blunt tool for calculating it, you can use:
amount of words in the post / average reading speed
According to Medium, people read about 275 words per minute. Medium also adds 12 seconds for each inline image, but I didn’t get that fancy.
Here’s the snippet:
| <?php | |
| /** | |
| * Estimates the reading time for a given piece of $content. | |
| * | |
| * @param string $content Content to calculate read time for. | |
| * @param int $wpm Estimated words per minute of reader. | |
| * | |
| * @returns int $time Esimated reading time. | |
| */ | |
| function prefix_estimated_reading_time( $content = '', $wpm = 300 ) { | |
| $clean_content = strip_shortcodes( $content ); | |
| $clean_content = strip_tags( $clean_content ); | |
| $word_count = str_word_count( $clean_content ); | |
| $time = ceil( $word_count / $wpm ); | |
| return $time; | |
| } |
To output the read time in your post, use something like this:
| <div class="reading-time"> | |
| <?php echo prefix_estimated_reading_time( get_the_content() ); ?> min read | |
| </div> |
If you prefer to use a plugin, there’s a few around. This snippet is mostly borrowed code from Reading Time WP, which is also on GitHub.
Yes, this is the plugin am looking for. Thanks for discovering it!
Thank you! That’s work for me :D