When you first start your blog, you have no idea what it will become over the course of years. It is always interesting to see stats like total posts, total comments, etc. But recently we stumbled onto a pretty cool plugin that shows you the total word count of your blog along with numerous other stats. As you write a post, WordPress shows you the word count at the bottom of the post edit area, but there is no easy way to display that count in public or even in private. In this article, we will show you how to get the total word count stats in WordPress, so you can see word count for specific authors, specific post types, and more.
First thing you need to do is install and activate the Word Stats plugin. Upon activation the plugin adds Word Stats link under Dashboard. Clicking on it will take you to the word count stats page.
The plugin will show you the total number of published words for each specific post type as well as individual author. You can also see the word count from a specific time period. It also shows you the most mentioned keywords in your articles along with showing you a really neat graph.
You can also see the Word Stats in your dashboard’s Right Now widget.
On your post edit screen, this plugin expands the default Word count section with some very useful information. First, it gives you the readability score of your article. It also tells you the keyword frequency of each keyword which can be good for copywriters.
There is a settings page for Word Stats plugin which is pretty self explanatory. You can find it under Settings » Word Stats.
If you want to display the total word count stats on your site for your users, then simply go to Appearance » Widgets and drag-drop the Total Word Counts widget to the appropriate location.
Once you do that, then the plugin will show the total number of words written on your site to all of your users. This can be a good bragging number for some of us writers.
We hope that this article helped you get the total word count stats in WordPress. Do you think that showing total word counts is useful or motivational? Let us know by leaving the comment below.
Shardha says
How can we count total number of another competitor’s website?? Suppose a website has 30 articles, how can we count total number of words in those 30 articles, since it is other’s website?
WPBeginner Support says
We do not have a recommended method for that at this time.
Admin
Melanie says
i cannot find the widget to count words, help!
WPBeginner Support says
You would want to reach out to the plugin’s support to see if it is an error with the plugin itself.
Admin
Ricard says
Thanks for the post! Great info! But as always I’d like to know more and more :D. Is there any method to know how many words have all the comments (approved) in a post, or in all posts of some category… or even all the posts in your website.
Thanks!!
WPBeginner Support says
We do not have a recommended method for that at the moment.
Admin
Haley Hines says
I’ve integrated user profiles into the sidebar of my site. I’d like to pull how many words that specific user has written into the profile. Is there an easy way to do this since I have this plugin installed?
Christian Karasiewicz says
Now if only this would integrate with Google Analytics to show authors how well their posts were performing.
Amy says
Really informative, thanks.
Gretchen Louise says
The writers at my contributor blog are going to love seeing the stats from this!
Editorial Staff says
Yes, this is a pretty nuts stat when you look at it.
Admin
Jigar Doshi says
I would love to check-out the plugin and check for myself the total number of words I’ve written over-all.
But, I’m not really sure I would like to show it to the whole world.
[P.S : I would only prefer showing the total pageviews to the world :P]
Editorial Staff says
Jigar, you don’t have to show the count to the whole world. You can just use it for your personal use in the admin panel.
Admin