I’ve been using WaniKani for nearly a year now and am still 4 kanji away from reaching level 5. I thought I wasn’t doing too badly until I looked up when I should start reading only to discover I should get to level 10 at a minimum!! Am I super slow at this? Confusion between readings for kanji and vocab kills me.
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How many lessons are you doing a day? How often do you review? How is your accuracy?
If you min-max the WK system, it’s possible to level up once a week (I don’t necessarily recommend that, because it’s a brutal schedule to keep up with.)
Getting radicals to Guru1 unlocks the remaining kanji of a level. Getting 90% of a level’s kanji to Guru1 triggers a level up.
So there is a combination of events going on that slows down that process for you.
If it helps: kanji have a pink background and vocab have a purple background, to help you on which answer they are looking for when it’s a single kanji entry.
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It does sound like you’re going unusually slowly and maybe there’s a problem there you need to identify and address. But separately from that: the “don’t start grammar til level 10” idea is pretty widely considered to be a bad one here. Start grammar whenever you want: beginner textbooks and resources do not assume you have pre-learnt a ton of kanji before you even start chapter one!
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I totally second that!
I started grammar pretty much when I joined WaniKani (because I discovered TextFugu at the same time)!
It’s a pity TextFugu is not longer available for subscription (and EtoEto won’t be released until Ayumu makes his move), because it was, in my opinion, the best textbook for absolute beginners…
But oh well, there are other great grammar resources!
Anyway, best of luck with your studies! 
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Welcome to community.
At 4 levels a year, it’s going to take you 15 years to complete WK and probably longer to get proficient. If you are okay with that, keep on keeping on. It’s not a race.
However, if you feel you want to speed up, just give that a try. At the worse you can decide to slow down again. So what. You are averaging around 1 lesson a day at the moment. Try 5 a day. If that’s too much, drop back to 3. It’s your learning journey. Do what’s right for you.
Consider the same thing for numbers of visits per day. Breaking up the workload into twice a day helps a lot, I find. However, if you can only log in daily that’s not the end of the world. If you can’t manage to log in on most days though, that could be a reason you are going more slowly than you thought.
Having to learn at least two readings for each kanji is a pain for everyone, as is remembering which one is which. Even once you know the rules, there are the exceptions. Sometimes I’ll just try both readings in my head to see which one “sounds” better. It’s surprising how well that works.
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A year for 5 levels is definitely slower than most. Of course it’s not a race, but you may want to reflect on how to improve that speed if it is something you want to do.
Here are a few things to think about:
- Are you doing the order manually or do you let WK pick the order for you?
- How many are you doing per day?
- Do you fail cards because of (legitimate) typos?
You mention confusion between kanji readings and vocab. One of the wonderful things about reading is that it’ll help reinforce what you learn.
The guidance to wait until 10 is likely to prevent people from being frustrated from seeing how little they can recognize. However, just because the guidance has good intentions doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good advice. Reading will help solidify your knowledge. Even if all you do is just scan pages to pick out words you know to start with, that is valuable practice. It is better to get used to reading and learning to accept that you won’t recognize everything (and that’s ok) than to cause retention issues by waiting.
Now, what you end up reading is up to you. You could:
- Join the Absolute Beginner book club
- Try your hand at a graded reader, or various short stories apps like Todaii, or easy news like NHK easy
- Try a kids’ book for children aged 10+. (Kindergarten level books often don’t have much or any kanji, so they’re not good to practice with).
- Try a manga/book for something you’ve already consumed in a language you are fluent in
- Or even at this stage, if you have a textbook (physical or online) that has short reading passages, they’re better than nothing.
- Try reading a transcript of an easy video or podcast. Comprehensible Input Japanese and JapanesePod101 have human-made transcripts.
- And many other things.
And of course you should be learning some grammar. Most example sentences in textbooks and other sites will have kanji, so not only do you get to learn important grammar, you’ll also get to review some kanji along the way.
Best of luck. Make sure you reflect periodically on what is or isn’t working for you and don’t get discouraged.
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It honestly depends on if you feel that this is the pace you need to go at or if it’s the pace you’re currently working at. By that I mean, if you’re struggling to have enough time to do reviews more than once a week, and can’t do lessons, and that isn’t likely to change, that’s all you can do. And that’s okay, slow progress is still progress, whereas a quick start and then stopping is not.
If you feel you could move faster and have the time, it looks like there’s already some good suggestions in the thread. I would definitely see if you have the chance to do multiple review sessions per day (maybe one in the morning, one in evening) and try to do any lessons you have to get those items into your review pile.
The good thing is, whatever you decide is right for you, you’ll have people here willing to help suggest how best to get there. 
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