Adding a Reading Time and Progress Bar to WordPress Websites

When building a website, providing an estimated reading time and adding a reading progress bar for articles can help readers better manage their time. In this article, Naiba recommends a plugin for adding estimated reading time and progress bars to WordPress.

Plugin Introduction

When users visit your website and view long articles, they often see too much text and worry about wasting too much time. Adding an approximate reading time and a reading progress bar can better encourage users to read the article. Read Meter is such aWordPress Plugin. The Read Meter plugin displays the estimated reading time and progress bar for blog posts. It can estimate reading time based on the amount of text and images in the post. You can set in the settings which pages display the estimated reading time, such as Posts, Pages, and Archive pages. You can also use the shortcode [read_meter] to control the display location.

Plugin Usage

1. Download the plugin via the download button at the end of this article and upload it. 2. After installation, activate read-meter. 3. Go to read-meter settings, select the post types where you want to display reading time, and set the words read per minute, whether to include comments and images.4. If you need to set the estimated time display, switch to the Read Time interface. Read Time Position: Choose where to display the estimated reading time—before content, above title, below title, or do not display. The display effect is as follows:5. If you need to use the reading progress bar, switch to Progress Bar. Choose the Display Position, style, color, etc. After saving, you can view the effect on the frontend.

Plugin Download

This is a new plugin. You can install it directly by searching for "Read Meter – Reading Time & Progress Bar" in the WordPress Admin Dashboard. If you cannot find it, please download and install it via the link below.Download Link