Many websites and blogs today feature “estimated reading times” for their articles, a trend popularized by platforms like Medium. However, I personally find it pretty worthless, and I advice against adding any kind of reading time indicator to your website.
Some purported benefits include that estimated reading times improve audience engagement or SEO, based on the notion that readers now have short attention spans and avoid long-form content. But this isn’t the audience I’m writing for, and I don’t want to encourage the consumption of short, fragmented information. If an article is lengthy, as an author, you can decide how to structure it, whether by breaking it into sections or splitting it up entirely. And we don’t need a reading time metric to help.
Speaking of reading time as a metric, it’s not just irrelevant, it’s wildly inaccurate and misleading. The time it takes to read something is heavily dependent on the complexity of the text and the reader’s prior knowledge. When I’m reading for entertainment or general information, I skim quickly. But when I’m diving into a knowledge piece, I read much slower as I need to comprehend the material. And most of the articles I write fall into the knowledge piece category. Furthermore, for articles that include code blocks, mathematical notation, or images, calculating reading time based on word count alone is simply nonsensical.