Idara Reading Time is a focused, single-purpose Gutenberg block that does one thing well: shows readers how long your post will take. It also offers an optional scroll progress bar — a thin bar pinned to the top or bottom of the page that fills as the visitor scrolls.
Idara (إدارة) is an Arabic word meaning “studio” or “administration” — the brand behind a growing family of carefully crafted, single-purpose Gutenberg blocks.
Why this and not a full block suite?
Most block plugins ship 30+ blocks you’ll never use, slowing your editor and your frontend. Idara plugins are deliberately small. This one is under 25 KB. CSS and JS load only on pages where the block is present — never globally.
Features
- Estimated reading time, calculated server-side from your post content
- Display as a single value (“3 min read”) or a friendly range (“2–3 min read”)
- Adjustable words-per-minute (50–600)
- 4 icon styles: clock, timer, hourglass, or none
- Optional scroll progress bar with color, height, and position (top/bottom)
- Hide on short posts (e.g. don’t show on anything under 2 minutes)
- Custom prefix and suffix text
- Inherits theme typography and text color via block supports
- Full Site Editing (FSE) compatible — works inside block templates and template parts
- Block toolbar shortcuts for icon cycling and range toggle
- Semantic, accessible markup with ARIA labels
- No tracking, no external requests, no third-party services
- Translation-ready
Use cases
- Blog posts where readers want to gauge time investment
- Long-form articles where the scroll progress bar improves engagement
- Documentation sites
- News and magazine layouts
Development
Source code and build tools are available on GitHub:
https://github.com/sajid-ansari-65/idara-reading-time
The src/ directory contains the unminified JavaScript (ES modules, JSX) and SCSS. Run npm install && npm run build to compile.
Screenshots
Block in the WordPress block inserter — find it by searching "Reading Time"
Block selected in the editor with toolbar shortcuts for icon cycling and range toggle
Block settings sidebar — Display, Calculation, Scroll progress bar, and Advanced panels
Display panel — icon style picker (clock, timer, hourglass, or none), Single/Range format toggle, and custom prefix/suffix fields
Calculation panel — adjustable words-per-minute (default 200 WPM) and hide-on-short-posts toggle
Scroll progress bar panel — enable toggle, live mini-preview, position (top/bottom), height, and color picker
Frontend — reading time with clock icon displayed in a post, with scroll progress bar visible at the bottom of the page
Frontend — reading time with hourglass icon displayed below the post title in a blog layout