Editorial work contains proofreading, publishing and updating the content regularly on a website. One of the main factors for editorial work is to keep the minimum word count of each article. In general, anything above 600 will work fine. However, it depends on your objective and site’s design. Sometimes, you also need to check the word count of all articles to find thin content and clean up. In this article, let us explain how to check word count of posts in WordPress.
Checking Word Count in WordPress Posts
WordPress offers simpler ways to check the word count on posts.
- Check word count in post editor.
- Find word count of all articles on “All Posts” admin page.
- View publishing history of word counts
Let’s explain all options in detail.
1. Check Word Count on WordPress Post Editor
It is a good idea to check the number of words before you publish the content online. You can use word processing tools like Microsoft Word or Apple Pages to find the number of words before even going to WordPress editor. However, if you have the habit of writing content directly on the online editor, then WordPress allows you to do that right from the editor. If you are using Gutenberg editor, click on the “Document Overview” icon on the top of the editor as shown in the below picture. You can get the structure of your post content along with the number words under “Outline” section.
If you are still using Classic Editor, then you can get the word count on the bottom status bar as shown below.
2. Word Count of All Posts in Admin Page
Viewing the word count on the admin page will help you to check the count on all posts. You can use this to find thin content and update them with more information or simply delete them. There are few plugins available for this purpose.
- Go to “Plugins > Add New” section.
- Search for “CH Easy Word Count” plugin.
- Install and activate the plugin.
- Go to “Posts > All Posts” section.
- You can see the column “Words” showing number of words in the post.
- Click on the column to sort and find out the posts having low number of words.
For testing purpose, we have also installed another plugin “Sortable Word Count Reloaded”. This does the similar job of adding “Word Count” column in the admin section. As you can see in the above screenshot, both plugins show different word count for the same post. We believe, this is due to the space and the content inside syntax highlighter. Whatsoever is the case, you can use any of the plugin to get approximate word count.
3. View Word Count Publishing History
If you have Jetpack plugin, it offers a fine overview of the number of published words weekly, monthly and yearly. If you don’t have Jetpack install and activate “WP Word Count” plugin. Go to “WP Word Count > Calculate” menu. The plugin will prompt you to calculate the word count first.
You can choose to calculate all content once or by a date range.
It may take some time to complete the calculation depending upon the number of posts on your site. Once done, click on the “statistics page” link or navigate through the tabs to view different statistics.
The plugin will show exhaustive details based on all content, monthly and author statistics. Also, you can get the publishing history of all custom post types available on your site.
Conclusion
We hope this article helped you to understand how to check word count in WordPress posts. You can find the count on the posts before publishing from the default editor. However, you need a separate plugin for getting more details like viewing the count on the admin page or getting publishing history. You can also use offline tools like Grammarly to track your writing history.
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