Website Word Counter
Enter the address of a page to find out how much text it contains. The counter downloads the page, strips away markup, scripts and styles, and reports the number of words a reader actually sees, with reading time, structure and the words that occur most.
- Encrypted connection
- No sign-up
- Free to use
How to use Website Word Counter
- Paste the address of the page or article.
- Select Count words.
- Read the word count and the related figures: characters, sentences and reading time.
- Look at the most used words and phrases, or copy the extracted text for further work.
Website Word Counter features
Counts visible text only
Scripts, styles, hidden templates and markup are excluded from the count.
Reading and speaking time
Estimates based on 230 words per minute for reading and 150 for speaking.
Top words and phrases
The most frequent content words and two-word phrases with their share of the text.
Structure overview
Headings by level, links, images, average sentence length and the page language.
Extracted text
The plain text of the page, ready to copy into another tool.
Text-to-code share
Shows how much of the HTML is readable text.
When to use Website Word Counter
- Checking the length of a published article against a brief.
- Comparing how much content competing pages offer on a topic.
- Estimating translation or editing effort for an existing page.
- Seeing which terms a page emphasises.
Website Word Counter FAQ
Which words are counted?
Everything in the visible body of the page: the main content and also navigation, sidebars and the footer, because they are part of what a visitor sees. Scripts, style sheets and markup are not counted. For the length of the article alone, copy the extracted text and remove the surrounding parts.
Why is the count lower than I expected?
Some sites insert their content with JavaScript after the page has loaded. The counter reads the HTML that the server delivers and does not run scripts, so text added later is missing. If almost nothing is counted, that is the likely reason.
How is reading time calculated?
By dividing the word count by 230 words per minute, a common average for adults reading on screen. Speaking time uses 150 words per minute, a comfortable presentation pace.
How long should a web page be?
Long enough to answer the visitor's question fully and no longer. Search engines do not reward a particular word count. Pages that rank for complex topics tend to be long because the topic needs it, not because length itself is a signal.
What is the text share of the HTML?
The size of the readable text divided by the size of the whole HTML document. Pages with heavy markup or large embedded scripts have a low share. It is a rough indicator of how much code surrounds the content, not a quality score.
Can I count words on a page that requires login?
No. The page is fetched from our server without your cookies, so only publicly accessible pages can be counted. For private content, paste the text into the Word Counter instead.
Measuring the content of a page
Counting words in a document is trivial; counting them on a web page is not, because a page is mostly not text. The HTML of a typical article contains navigation menus, scripts, tracking snippets, style rules and structural markup that together can outweigh the article many times. A meaningful word count has to separate what a person reads from everything else, and that is what happens here: the page is parsed, non-content elements are removed, and the remaining text is counted.
The figure is useful in several kinds of work. Editors and clients use it to verify that a delivered article meets the agreed length. Translators and proofreaders quote by the word. Content strategists compare the depth of pages competing for the same search: if the leading results all provide two thousand words of detailed explanation, a three-hundred-word page is unlikely to be seen as an equally complete answer, although the reverse does not follow automatically.
The frequency lists show the vocabulary a page leans on. The most frequent content words and word pairs should match the subject the page is meant to cover. If they turn out to be menu labels or boilerplate, the page has little main content relative to its chrome. If one phrase dominates unnaturally, the text may read as repetitive.
Treat all of these numbers as descriptions, not targets. Writing to a word count, or repeating a phrase to reach a percentage, makes text worse. The count tells you how much is there; whether it is the right amount depends on what the reader came for.