The prospect of a long read can discourage an otherwise sympathetic visitor. People will, surprisingly, be frightened by the appearance of a large block of text. By displaying an estimated reading time for your posts, you help the reader manage their time a little better. By showing them the estimated time it takes to parse your post, Show your visitors that you appreciate their time, and reassure them that the content they’re interested in won’t take too long. A busy reader will appreciate it.
We’ll show you how to use a free plugin to view the estimated reading time of your posts, as well as a plugin that shows your visitors how far they’ve come by adding a reading progress bar to your posts.
we will use Read Meter Addition. If you’re not already working with a theme that includes this functionality, you’ll need to find this plugin and install it. If you’re not sure how to find, install and activate a WordPress plugin, we have a tutorial for that too.
Next, you need to configure your plugin. Set route to Settings > Read Counter. Inside General Settings In the tab you can set the forecast calculator. words per minute. The default is 275 words per minute, which is a low to average speed for the English language. Of course, different languages have different average reading speeds in words per minute.
You can also choose fonts include (we keep the default which is posts only). You can also choose to include it. images and comments. This plugin works assuming the parsing of the first image takes 12 seconds, the second 11 seconds and up to the 10th image. The tenth and each subsequent image adds three seconds to the estimate – the assumption is that the reader spends more time studying the first few images and less time per image as they progress. We will include images in our estimate.
Inside reading time In the tab, we can set the display of our estimated reading time. Use the first three checkboxes to set where the estimated reading time is displayed. we will leave Single Post checked, but you can also show it for House and Archive pages.
we will position reading time under the post title, prefix with Estimated reading time (default reading time) and replace final fix with minute instead of default minute.
Later, we will leave Font Size It is 15px, but you can adjust the font size as you like; we don’t change margins and padding settings. In the end, we will leave background color as is, but change the text color to mauve (#aa86a6) to match the overall theme. We will save our settings and move on to the progress bar.
Inside progress bar we will set the tab Viewing Position with top of page To reveal other options. we will leave styles aspect Normal and set the Background Color to light gray (#cbcacb) and the Primary Color to mauve (#aa86a6) that we used earlier. We will leave the bar thickness as it is. These settings affect how the progress bar looks. You can change them to match the style and layout of your website. this While starting tab is a simple set of instructions for using this plugin. If you are reading this, you already have all the information in much more detail.
After all your changes are saved, you can see what the plugin looks like in a post. And you can see your estimated time just below the post title!
As a result
As we’ve shown, it’s easy to give your visitors extra information to show you appreciate their time. With Read Meter you have a free and simple solution. Visitors to blogs or text-oriented websites can easily ask for at least a rough estimate of the time it takes to fully appreciate the content you have to offer. With an estimated reading time and/or a progress bar, they’ll have this information at a glance, whether you’re using a theme feature or the Read Meter plugin. Informing your visitors that reading your posts won’t take many of their busy schedules can help keep your bounce rate low.
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