WordPress – Estimated Reading Time

I have a theme coming out soon that displays the ‘estimated reading time’ for each blog post on the homepage.

The theme is inspired by the new blogging service Medium – but I first saw the idea mentioned on Brian Crays blog. I thought it was a really nice thing to add – and the idea that people are more likely to read an article when they know how long it is was quite appealing (in fact I am now wondering if I should add it on this site as well).

Anyway – the code was quite simple – so I turned it into an easily reusable function, as seen below.

All the code does is calculate the number of words in the article, and then assign a number of seconds per word. It’s very simple but gives quite nice results.

/**
 * Estimate time required to read the article
 *
 * @return string
 */
function bm_estimated_reading_time() {

	$post = get_post();

	$words = str_word_count( strip_tags( $post->post_content ) );
	$minutes = floor( $words / 120 );
	$seconds = floor( $words % 120 / ( 120 / 60 ) );

	if ( 1
<p>I'll be posting about the theme in question the future - so I'll point it out then 🙂</p>
<p class="message information">The theme in question is called Kent and it's now available to buy on WordPress.com. You can <a href="http://kentdemo.wordpress.com/">check out the Kent demo here</a>.</p>

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Thanks for reading. I'd really appreciate it if you'd link to this page if you mention it in your newsletter or on your blog.