Creating a Read Progress Bar in React and TailwindCSS

Recently, I was reading one of my favorite author's articles on his website. I realized he has a reading progress bar at the top, which helps gauge how much of the article is left to read.

I thought this makes for a good user experience, and I should add this to my articles on my personal website as well. So, I went ahead and did it.

Breakdown

1. Find how much a user can scroll down on this page.
2. Find how much the user has scrolled down on the page.
3. Get the ratio by dividing the later by the former.

Voila, there we have our scroll percentage aka "reading progress".

Code snippet

import { useEffect, useState } from "react";

/**
 * React Hook to get the scroll percentage from the page, returns a value from 0 to 100
 */
export function useReadingProgress() {
  const [completion, setCompletion] = useState(0);
  useEffect(() => {
    function updateScrollCompletion() {
      // see how much we have scrolled
      const currentProgress = window.scrollY;
      // see how much total scroll is available
      let scrollHeight = document.body.scrollHeight - window.innerHeight;
      if (scrollHeight) {
        setCompletion(
          Number((currentProgress / scrollHeight).toFixed(2)) * 100
        );
      }
    }
    // add scroll event listener
    window.addEventListener("scroll", updateScrollCompletion);

    // remove scroll event listener on umount
    return () => {
      window.removeEventListener("scroll", updateScrollCompletion);
    };
  }, []);
  return completion;
}

The rest of the work is to show this information on the UI, for that, I just show a progress bar on the NavBar up top.

Styling

I use TailwindCSS for my website and it was very easy to make this progress bar with it

export default function NavBar() {
  const completion = useReadingProgress();
  return (
    <nav className="sticky z-50 top-0 backdrop-blur-3xl py-2">
      <span
        id="progress-bar"
        style={{
          transform: `translateX(${completion - 100}%)`,
        }}
        className={`absolute bottom-0 w-full transition-transform duration-150 h-1 bg-yellow-400`}
      />
      {/* Rest of the NavBar */}
    </nav>
  );
}

We use the transform and translate CSS properties to make the UI for the progress bar.

The #progress-bar is by default exists at the bottom of NavBar but by using translateX we move it across the X-axis.

Because we do translateX(${completion - 100}%)

• At 0% progress, it translates -100% on the X-axis, making it disappear
• At 100% progress, it translates 0% on the X-axis, showing it fully

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That's it for now. I hope you find this article helpful! Should you have any feedback or questions, please feel free to put them in the comments below, I would love to hear and work on them.

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Until next time