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!