Four free plugins add an estimated reading time (or a scroll progress bar) to WordPress posts without touching your theme’s code: Reading Time WP, Read Meter, WP Reading Progress, and Worth The Read. If you just want a reading time label with zero setup, Reading Time WP does that the moment you activate it. If your posts are heavy on images and you want the estimate to account for them, Read Meter is the more accurate pick. The rest of this post compares what each one actually does, how to set it up, and where each one falls short.
Reading time is a small feature, which is exactly why the big WordPress blogs have never given it a real comparison. WPBeginner’s own guide on the topic walks through a WPCode snippet instead of reviewing a plugin, and a search for “best WordPress reading time plugins” turns up vendor blogs and directory sites, not a roundup from WPBeginner, Kinsta, or Elegant Themes. That leaves the four plugins below under-covered relative to how often the feature actually gets requested on client sites and in WordPress support forums.
| Plugin | Best for | Price | Last updated |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reading Time WP | A reading time label with no configuration | Free | August 26, 2026 |
| Read Meter | Image-aware reading time plus a progress bar | Free | August 24, 2026 |
| WP Reading Progress | A progress bar that follows sticky headers | Free | August 15, 2026 |
| Worth The Read | An understated, scroll-triggered progress bar | Free | August 26, 2026 |
Reading Time WP
Reading Time WP is the simplest of the four, and that simplicity is the whole point of it. Activate it and it immediately prepends an estimated reading time to the top of every post’s content, no settings screen required to get started. If you want to move the label somewhere else in your template, a [rt_reading_time] shortcode takes optional label, postfix, and postfix_singular arguments, so you can write something like “Read time: 4 minutes” instead of the default phrasing.
- Price: Free
- Requires: WordPress 3.0.1+, PHP not specified by the developer
- Last updated: August 26, 2026
Setup is a Settings menu away: once activated, a new Reading Time entry shows up under Settings in your WordPress dashboard, where you can turn the automatic insertion off if you’d rather place the shortcode manually, and edit the label text. There’s no block editor integration beyond the shortcode, and no progress bar at all. If a visual progress indicator matters to you, look at Read Meter or WP Reading Progress instead; this plugin does exactly one thing and doesn’t try to do more.
Read Meter
Read Meter, built by Brainstorm Force (the team behind the Astra theme), combines a reading time estimate with a scroll progress bar, and it’s the only one of the four that adjusts its time estimate for images in the post. The plugin adds 12 seconds for the first image, 11 for the second, stepping down to 3 seconds per image after the tenth, a detail that matters if you publish photo-heavy tutorials or portfolio-style posts where a word count alone would understate how long a post actually takes to read.
- Price: Free
- Requires: WordPress 4.2+, PHP 5.2+
- Last updated: August 24, 2026
After activation, a Read Meter screen appears under Settings where you configure the progress bar’s color and position and whether the reading time label shows alongside it. A [read_meter] shortcode is available if you want to place the output somewhere other than the plugin’s default position. The minimum PHP requirement of 5.2 is unusually low for a plugin still receiving updates in 2026, which is a sign it was built for broad compatibility rather than newer PHP features; that’s a non-issue on any host running a current PHP version, but worth knowing if you’re troubleshooting on very old infrastructure.
WP Reading Progress
WP Reading Progress leads with the progress bar, not the reading time label, and it’s the most configurable of the four about where that bar actually sits. You can pin it to the top of the screen, the bottom, or have it attach to a sticky header element on your site, and the plugin will fall back to the top of the screen if no sticky element is present when the page loads. You can also scope it to specific post types or individual posts rather than turning it on sitewide.
- Price: Free
- Requires: WordPress 4.9+, PHP 5.6+
- Last updated: August 15, 2026
Configuration lives under Settings > WP Reading Progress, where you pick the bar’s color, position, and which post types it should run on. It also supports right-to-left languages by respecting the dir="rtl" attribute on your site’s HTML tag, a detail the other three plugins don’t mention in their own documentation. The estimated reading time feature was only added in version 1.6.0 and the developer still labels it “beta” in the plugin’s own description, so if a reliable reading time number matters more to you than the progress bar itself, treat that part as secondary and lean on Reading Time WP or Read Meter instead.
Worth The Read
Worth The Read takes a different approach to the progress bar: it stays hidden until the visitor actually starts scrolling, then fades back out once they stop or scroll past the content. That makes it the least visually intrusive option here if you don’t want a bar sitting on screen the entire time a visitor is on the page. A separate reading time commitment feature can be toggled on independently, using a flat 200 words-per-minute metric, and placed above the title, below the title, or above the content.
- Price: Free
- Requires: WordPress 3.8+, PHP not specified by the developer
- Last updated: August 26, 2026
The one setup step that trips people up: after activating Worth The Read, nothing shows on your site until you open the Worth The Read settings screen and explicitly select at least one option under “Display On”, such as Posts or Pages. Unlike Reading Time WP, which works the moment you activate it, this plugin does nothing by default. A [wtr-time] shortcode lets you place the reading time label somewhere other than the automatic position if you’ve enabled that feature.
How to Pick
- If you want a reading time label with no configuration at all, use Reading Time WP.
- If your posts are image-heavy and you want the time estimate to account for that, use Read Meter.
- If you want a progress bar that follows a sticky header, targets specific post types, or needs RTL support, use WP Reading Progress.
- If you want the most understated progress bar on the list, one that only appears while someone is actively scrolling, use Worth The Read.
- If you need reading time or scroll progress built into a custom block or tied into other on-page logic these plugins don’t cover, our Plugin Development team can build it directly into your theme or a small custom plugin instead of bolting on a fourth settings screen.
Worth noting across all four: none of them require a page builder or a block-editor integration to work, and all four are plain settings-page plugins you configure once and forget about. If you’re already comparing this against other small reading-experience additions, our posts on table of contents plugins and adding breadcrumbs without an SEO plugin cover two other features in the same category: small, single-purpose plugins that improve how a post reads rather than what it ranks for.
FAQ
Does showing a reading time actually improve SEO?
Not directly. Reading time isn’t a ranking factor Google has confirmed using. What it can do is set a visitor’s expectations before they commit to a long post, which in some cases improves time on page and reduces the chance someone bounces immediately after landing. Treat it as a user experience signal, not an SEO tactic.
Can I add reading time without installing a plugin?
Yes, with a PHP snippet in your theme’s functions.php file or a code snippets plugin like WPCode, calculating word count divided by an assumed words-per-minute rate. That avoids adding another active plugin, but you lose the settings screen, the shortcode, and any progress bar functionality these four plugins already built and maintain.
Will any of these slow down my site?
All four are lightweight, single-purpose plugins that run one small calculation per page load and, for the progress bar options, a short script to track scroll position. None of them load external resources or third-party scripts. The bigger performance variable on most WordPress sites is image sizes and caching, not a reading time plugin.
Can I change the words-per-minute calculation these plugins use?
Worth The Read states its calculation outright: 200 words per minute, fixed. Reading Time WP and WP Reading Progress don’t publish their exact formula in their readme files, so if you need a specific, auditable words-per-minute rate for editorial reasons, Worth The Read is the only one of the four that documents its math.
Do these work with the WordPress block editor?
Yes. All four were built before block-editor-native development became the norm and work by filtering post content or injecting output via a shortcode, which means they work the same way on classic-editor and block-editor posts alike. None of them ship as a block you insert directly, so you won’t find them in the block inserter.
