I recently encountered bugs where the reading time widget of BricksBuilder shows different times in the query loop I set up on the homepage compared to that in the single blog post template. Notice in the below images: the reading time in the single blog post showing “12 minutes” while in the query loop showing “18 minutes”.

After a while of browsing the BricksBuilder forum, I didn’t find a solution that fits my case specifically. I did glimpse a comment saying that the reading time doesn’t work well in their native language, which got me thinking. I then looked into the Reading Time widget and saw that you can change the calculation time based on words per minute or characters per minute. I tried changing it to “characters per minute” for both the query loop and the single blog post, and now they show the same reading time. I figured that since the blog posts on the website are written in Vietnamese and the phonetics usually count as characters too, uniforming how the widget calculates the reading time based on characters could fix the issue.

For those using Elementor, there isn’t a reading time widget. A workaround would be to manually input the reading time via a custom post type. You can check how to do this with a tutorial from Jeffrey at Lytbox:

If you’re more advanced and comfortable with PHP, you can pull the data from WordPress to display on the front end of your website. Please let me know if you know how to do this or have any tutorials you can share—I’d love to learn about this too!