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WPBeginner» Blog» Tutorials» How to Set a Minimum Word Count for WordPress Posts

How to Set a Minimum Word Count for WordPress Posts

Last updated on July 17th, 2012 by Editorial Staff
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How to Set a Minimum Word Count for WordPress Posts

Do you run a blog with multiple authors? Then, you probably have wondered how you can set a minimum word count for your posts in WordPress. In this article, we will share with you a snippet that lets you set a minimum Word count for your WordPress posts. If a user tries to publish a post that is too small, then it will return an error telling them the post is not long enough.

Simply open your theme’s functions.php file and paste the following code:

function minWord($content)
{
	global $post;
	$content = $post->post_content;
	if (str_word_count($content) < 100 ) //set this to the minimum number of words
	wp_die( __('Error: your post is below the minimum word count. It needs to be longer than 100 words.') );
}
add_action('publish_post', 'minWord');

You may change the minimum number of words from 100 to whatever you like. You can also customize the error to make it helpful.

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10 Comments

Leave a Reply
  1. Alin says:
    Mar 20, 2019 at 5:04 pm

    hello,
    it still works and is very useful. thank you.

    how about if I want to show the error message instead the “post published. view post” message it shows when you press the publish button? or even better in a browser error popup

    as it is, the script kills wp and displays the message in a new page, but still publishes the article.

    chapeau

    Reply
    • WPBeginner Support says:
      Mar 21, 2019 at 11:17 am

      Thank you for letting us know about this, it could be due to updates to WordPress. We will certainly take a look at alternatives.

      Reply
  2. BoiteAWeb says:
    Mar 16, 2012 at 5:33 am

    Hello
     
    No need to globalize $post since it’s passed in 2nd argument.
    You “$content” parameter is wrong, the 1st param is not the content but a post ID.
    So i modified the code to change this, i used ‘dummy’ to understand we do not need it in you function.
     
    function minWord( $postID_dummy, $post ) {
      $content = $post->post_content;
      if (str_word_count($content) < 100 ) //set this to the minimum number of words
        wp_die( __(‘Error: your post is below the minimum word count. It needs to be longer than 100 words.’) );
    }
    add_action( ‘publish_post’, ‘minWord’, 10, 2 );
     
    Core : http://core.trac.wordpress.org/browser/trunk/wp-includes/post.php#L2980
     
    See you !
     
    Julio – WordPress Expert.

    Reply
  3. Antillais says:
    Nov 27, 2010 at 8:54 am

    do you think this can work this gravity form plugin ?

    Reply
  4. Frank Mulder says:
    Nov 19, 2010 at 11:27 am

    Wohaa! I’ve been looking for this for a long time! Tnx!

    Reply
  5. Jeff Bridgforth says:
    Nov 19, 2010 at 11:17 am

    I assume you could edit this script and set it up for a maximum word count as well. Is this correct?

    Reply
    • Editorial Staff says:
      Nov 19, 2010 at 11:12 pm

      Yes you can do that as well.

      Reply
    • AJ Clarke says:
      Apr 25, 2011 at 11:46 am

      Yea, don’t you just turn the bracket around ( more)

      Reply
  6. Brandon Cox says:
    Nov 18, 2010 at 7:02 pm

    Ah, cool little trick! I can see it coming in handy on those mega-magazine blogs everyone wants to build.

    Reply
  7. Mark Morgan says:
    Nov 18, 2010 at 3:26 pm

    Is there a way to do that with comments, too? A minimum comment size might improve the quality of them.

    Reply

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