If you write to a slow drive, for example a USB drive, you may want to know not only the progress of the command dd itself, but also the progress of actual writing to the target device.
You can modify the dd command line to make it flush the buffers regularly, for example after writing each mibibyte, and at the same time show the progress, for example
sudo dd if=file.img bs=1M of=/dev/sdx status=progress oflag=dsync
Please check and double-check, that you specify the correct target device. Otherwise you might overwrite valuable data. dd does what you tell it to do without any questions.