Alana C. yeah Siraj is correct in what the intended implementation is on the post listing sections - a hidden text field. I agree, likely not the "most" performant way to do it but its just text, we're talking about bytes here. If you mark "lazy load" on the images inside of rich text, which I think is possible, the images never load so they never become a factor here. Accessibility would be another consideration but I think there are ways around that as well.
Generally though, I drop the "5 min read" from my designs immediately. For me, its not worth the headache to implement. But obviously if its an editorial site where readers are making quick decisions on what to read, a meta data like that could be important.
Crazy how such a small detail needs so much consideration huh? Web design is a wild field...
So without further context, things to consider would be:
- 1.
How sensitive would readers be to not having this information upfront?
- 2.
How sensitive is the business or client to performance?
- 3.
Is it worth the hoops to jump for accessibility?
Custom JS or storing this information within the CMS itself as a custom field are other options. For example let's say that the content is created in a tool like Notion or some other tool - most writing tools have a way to calculate this roughly - its a formula - number of words, average words per minute reader etc. So its a predictable formula. I seem to recall one time I had this get calculated automatically via airtable using formulas.
Its probably even easier these days with AI embeded everywhere - just ask AI how long the average reader would take to read this post, then input that number into a custom field.
