Content
Word Count and Reading Time
Count the words, then see how long the page takes to read
Paste text or a URL and get the word, character, sentence and paragraph counts for the main content with boilerplate excluded, a reading time at a stated words-per-minute convention, and the same counts broken out per heading section.
Get early accessWhat it returns
- Words, characters with and without spaces, sentences and paragraphs for the main content, with navigation, footer and comment text left out of the total.
- A reading time, with the divisor printed next to it. Our own guides use words divided by 220 words per minute, which is a convention we picked and not a measurement of your readers.
- The same word count per heading section, so a 3,000 word page with 2,400 of them under one subheading is visible as a structural problem.
- Average sentence and paragraph length, plus the longest sentence quoted back, which is usually the one worth splitting.
When this matters
A brief says 1,800 words and the draft comes back at what the writer's editor claims is 1,840. The CMS counts the author bio, the related-posts list and the cookie notice, the writing app counts the H2s, and nobody agrees because nobody declared what was being counted. The useful version of this tool is the one that says which text it measured before it reports a number.
How to answer this today
The content area asks the question behind the word count: what a page is ranking for, which queries it already earns impressions on, and what the pages above it cover. Length is a weak proxy for all of that, and a target word count is an output of competitive reading rather than a rule. Counting words in a draft you have not published is a smaller job that needs no project attached to it.
ContentWhy this is harder than it looks
Reading speed is a convention
There is no industry-standard divisor. Published adult silent reading rates vary widely by text difficulty, familiarity and reader, so any single number is a choice. The honest output states the rate used and treats the minutes as a label, not a measurement.
What counts as a word
Hyphenated compounds, numbers, URLs, code snippets and CJK text with no spaces in it all break a naive split on whitespace. Two tools can both be right and disagree by several percent, which is why the counting rule has to be stated.
Isolating the main content
Counting everything a URL returns inflates the total with menus, sidebars, related links and footers, and the amount of inflation depends on the template. Main content has to be separated before the first word is counted.
Pages that render in the browser
A plain fetch of a client-rendered page can come back with almost no text. Reporting 40 words for a 2,000 word article is worse than saying the page needs to be rendered first, so the failure has to be named rather than numbered.