How do I work out the reading time to show at the top of my blog post?

Exactly how the number is worked out

The formula in the Word and character counter is a single line: words divided by speed, times 60 to turn it into seconds, rounded up to the next whole second. Nothing else goes in: not sentence length, not images, not how hard the subject is. That is why the tool calls it an estimate.

• 1,200 words at 200: 360 seconds, shown as '6 min'.
• 1,200 words at 250: 288 seconds, shown as '4 min 48 sec'.
• 1,200 words at 180: 400 seconds, shown as '6 min 40 sec'.

Changing the speed alone moved the result from under 5 minutes to nearly 7 for the same article. The number at the top of your post reflects your choice of speed as much as the length of the piece.

Which speed to choose

There is no single correct speed. A reader on a phone during a lunch break reads one way; an engineer working through a technical guide reads another. The tool accepts any speed from 50 to 1,000 words per minute, and 200 is a reasonable starting point, nothing more. A simple way to choose your own:

1. Take a paragraph from one of your earlier posts and paste it into the counter to get its word count.
2. Ask someone like your typical reader to read it silently, and time them on your phone.
3. Divide the words by the minutes. That is roughly your readers' speed; enter it in 'Reading speed'.
4. Use the same speed for every post on the blog, so the figures stay consistent and comparable.

How to show it to readers

Readers do not care that a post takes 4 minutes 48 seconds. Round to whole minutes and write '5 min read', for example. And if the post has a table or practical steps readers will follow as they go, remember the real time will be longer than the estimate, because the calculation counts words only.

Since the title and description are what readers see in search results before any reading time, check how they look with the Search snippet preview once the article is done.

Do numbers and links count?

Yes, because they count as words. A number such as 2026 is a word, and a link or email address can be split into several words. If your post is full of links or code, the estimate will run a little above the real reading time. For a cleaner figure, paste only the readable text, without the list of references at the end.