Optic Read-O-Meter

Drops a small “X min read” line above each post on your site. Same little badge Medium uses and most blogs use.

The plugin counts the words, divides by reading speed, prepends the badge above the content. That is the whole thing. No tracking, no upsells, no third-party scripts.

What you can change from Settings, Optic Read-O-Meter:

• Words per minute (default 200, the global newspaper average).
• Style: pill, minimal, dark, outline, or none.
• Icon: clock, coffee, book, or none.
• Colors via the WordPress color picker, plus seven one-click palettes (Emerald, Sky, Rose, Amber, Violet, Slate, Dark).
• Position above, below, or both.
• Separate singular and plural templates, one for “1 minute read” and one for “5 minutes read”.
• Optional image time. Each image adds 12 seconds by default, the same convention Medium uses.
• Minimum word count to skip the badge on short posts.
• Which post types get the auto-prepended badge.

Per post, an editor sidebar lets you hide the badge for a specific post or set a manual minute count.

A Reading Time Gutenberg block ships with the plugin. Drop it anywhere in the block editor and pick “Styled badge” or “Plain text” from the sidebar. There is also a shortcode for non-block contexts: [optrom_reading_time], [optrom_reading_time format="badge"], or [optrom_reading_time template="About %s"].

Performance: word and image counts are cached in post meta on save. After that, rendering reads one integer. No external HTTP, no analytics.

For developers, two filters: optrom_words_per_minute to override the WPM per post, and optrom_label to replace the entire label string.

The plugin cleans up after itself. Option and post meta are deleted on uninstall.