Have you ever been in the middle or writing an amazing blog and wanted to know how many words you’ve typed? Or maybe you’ve been on a competing website and wanted to know how many words they’ve typed? We’ve all been there. The good news is there are tons of technologies to help you count words on a website effortlessly.
How to easily count the number of words on a blog
What’s the best tool to count the number of words on a web page? The easiest tool to count words on a website is with a simple a Google Chrome plugin called Word Counter Plus. You highlight the text, right click, and it shows you how many words you’ve highlighted. It’s simple and effective. And the best part is that you can do this on any page as long as you’re in Chrome.
Most people are blogging in one of four places: WordPress, Medium, LinkedIn, or SquareSpace. There are others, but these are the biggest names right now. And of these platforms, only a few have built in word counters. What a shame!
There are a few great tools that you can use to count words as you are typing depending on which platform you are blogging in. Personally, I like using plugins either in a blogging platform or from the chrome store. I want to be sure that my words aren’t being tracked or copied—but that’s just me (i.e., I don’t want to copy and paste my words in a random website to count).
At this point in the world of website builders, word counters should be mandatory, but they aren’t. Either way, we’ve got you covered. Let’s dive into the most popular website builders and see how to keep track of your word count.
How to count the number of words on a page in WordPress
If you are blogging in WordPress, you can use the built in word counter at the top. You can easily press the “i” at the top of the page in the post editor to reveal total words count, paragraph count, and a nifty page outline.
I like this feature in WordPress because it tells me how many headings I have as well. This gives me a quick status update on my progress.
The page outline is very cool too. It quickly shows me how my documents are formatted with headers. I often use this feature when I brain-dump onto a document and I need to look at the entire picture of article formatting without scrolling up and down on the page a million times. I know you know what I’m talking about.
How to count the number of words in Medium
In Medium, counting the words on your page is SUPER easy. In order to find your word count, simply copy any amount of text and then the word count will appear at the top of the page.
How easy is that?
I like Medium’s decision to make this really easy. No buttons, menus, or weird right-clicking needed. I found this by accident the first time I selected all of the text.
Be aware that it will only start counting after you have written a few sentences.
Improvements: I think Medium would do well to show the outline of your blog like WordPress does when highlighting text. It’s a small nitpick, but I believe this is a really helpful feature.
Overall, good job Medium 🙂
How to count the number of words in LinkedIn
LinkedIn isn’t as easy as WordPress or Medium because it doesn’t have a built in word counter. I think this is a huge over-sight, but I’m also not the CEO of a billion dollar company, so there’s that.
My advice is to use the handy chrome plugin I mentioned earlier (Word Counter Plus). Highlight your text, right click Word Counter Plus, and bingo–counted words.
How to count the number of words on a page Square Space
Sorry to break it to you, but Square Space doesn’t have a word counter. Just like LinkedI, you will have to find an offline tool to do this job for you.
When you are updating your Square Space site with a new blog, do so in Google Chrome and use the Word Counter Plus plugin. It’s simple and effective.
How to count the number words on the page in Google Docs
Many people like to first write in Google Docs and then copy and paste their work over to their preferred blogging platform. Google Docs makes it incredibly easy to count the words on your page.
Three steps to counting words in Google Docs:
- Highlight the text you want to count
- Click “Tools” in the top toolbar
- Click “Word Count”
- Google Docs will display your selected word count and total word count
That’s all there is to it. Thank you for listening to us Google and adding that in.
Side note: There are other word count tools that you can download as extensions for Google docs, but I do not use them because they often are removed from the Extension store after some time. I”ve seen a few really good ones already removed.
How To count words anywhere on the internet
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been on the internet and I needed to count words quickly on a web page and I didn’t have a great tool to do it.
In the old days, you’d highlight all of the words and then paste them into a website and it would return a word count. These websites always felt sketchy with their weird ads and dated formatted. Those days are over.
With Google Chrome, you can simplify the process really easily. One of the beauties of using Google Chrome is that you can take advantage of nifty plugins. One such plugin is the Word Count Plus plugin in the chrome store.
The anytime word count plugin for Chrome is AMAZING! You’ll need Google Chrome, but it’s well worth the switch if you aren’t a current user.
It’s an awesome plugin. You can highlight any amount of text, right-click, and select Word Count Plus. All of the words on the page will be counted immediately.
The best part is that you can do this inside of your WordPress, SquareSpace, Medium, or any blog platform operating inside of Google chrome.
I use this plugin all the time. In fact, I most often use this plugin during keyword research. I can look at a competitors page and quickly see how much content they wrote a quick select-all/word count plus. Now, I have a much better idea of the amount of content I may need to compete.
If you aren’t sure how much content your site needs or even how to begin to do keyword research, read all about content length in our beginners SEO guide. This guide is focused towards “free” keyword research. And yes, you can do excellent keyword research for free.
How to count words without software or a plugin
As I mentioned above, I always like to count words with a plugin or built-in blogging word counter (WordPress, Medium, etc). However, if you aren’t looking to use a software, don’t have Google Chrome, and aren’t counting inside of a blog, you can use a few websites.
With that being said, you can easily go to any search engine and type in “Word Counter”. Any of the first five results will probably work just fine. I’d be careful to not paste any text in that is meaningful or important to your business/life.
The reason I am not suggesting a specific word counting website is because most haven’t been through any third party validations to ensure that the site is safe. I always feel better when I download a plugin from the Chrome store or when it’s built into the application I am using.
A longer, safer option to counting words:
A word processing tool like Microsoft Word or Google Docs is always a good alternative. Highlight all the text on the page and paste this into your word processor.
Microsoft Word will show the number of words at the bottom of the page and Google Docs has a built in word counter (we covered this above).
Why counting words on a website is important
For some time now there has been a well established correlation between a webpage’s word count and its ability to rank for keywords.
Originally, the thinking was that search engines liked longer form content better than shorter content. Black and white, cut and dry. And in the early days, this may have been true.
However, search engines have become smarter and they are better at determining which page(s) best answers a specific inquiry.
And that is the key: the page that best answers the question has a better chance of ranking. The more content you write about a specific topic, the more likely you’ve provided the most robust resource.
And sure, anyone can write a bunch of filler content, but search engines are keeping track of all the data. Filler content is easily dropped in rankings as users click away from non-helpful content.
What’s more is that search engines also posses incredibly complex word-analysis algorithms that not only link words together, but also expect you to cover certain ideas and concepts when writing about a topic.
Search engines are looking for DEPTH, not just length.
For example, if you are going to blog about “The Best Method to Improve Photography,” search engines will naturally expect to see you talk about aperture, lenses, shutter-speed, ISO, f-stop, lighting, and more.
Millions of data points are being collected about the habits of searchers. Data such as which pages they click on, which headlines were clicked, relevant words and phrases in the most popular articles, how long each reader stayed on the webpage, which pages they clicked after, and the list goes on.
All of this points to one universal truth…
Writing the most helpful blog page will increase your chances to rank better AND the most helpful blog pages are often the most detailed, and at times, longer than average.
While there isn’t a universal length that you need, we are happy to give you some guidance on how many words you may consider writing.
Helpful tip: Including your own images, graphics, tables, and more can help set send important content signals to search engines that your content is not only unique, but robust as well.
Do titles and headers count when counting website words?
Yes, titles and headers are included when counting all of the words on your webpage. There is a very simple way to think about what words are counted on your page for SEO: everything you type on your blog page is counted.
Is there anything that isn’t counted?
Yes, static text such as menus, sidebar information, footer information, and page graphics (e.g., popups, doormats, etc) will not be included in the count.
Related Questions:
How long should my blog be? For a personal/non-monetized blog, any word length is fine. If your blog is used to power a business, longer blog lengths typically perform better in search engines. 1200+ words per blog is typically a great place to begin. My shortest blogs tend to average 1500 words and my longest blogs can eclipse more than 5000 words.
If writing that many words feels daunting, consider hiring a writer. You can use our guide to understand pricing and general writing-service knowledge. The industry quality is all over the place.
How do I count all the words on a website? This isn’t quite as easy as counting the words on a webpage. The following technique works best for a smaller blog because the blog lengths are more predictable than websites that have large teams and diverse pages (ecommerce, directories, news sites, etc).
If you are looking for a rough estimate of the total number of words on a website:
- Visit https://sitechecker.pro/page-counter/
- Type in the homepage of the website you want to count
- Find the total number of pages (image below)
- Count the total number of words on 3 blog entires from the website and average them
- Multiply average by total number of pages
This will be an over estimate, but it can be helpful. Keep in mind most blogs have an about me, contact page, home page, and maybe even product pages that may not be relevant to your needs.
