WordPress Word Count: How to See It (and Display It Anywhere)

The fastest way to see the word count of any post or page in WordPress: click the document overview icon (the small lines icon at the top-left of the block editor) and look at the Outline tab. You’ll get word count, character count, heading count, paragraph count, block count, and estimated reading time, all in one panel.

That’s the quick answer. The longer version covers how to see word count in the classic editor, how to get a site-wide total across every post, how to display the count on the front end of your site, how WordPress actually counts words (it’s a little weirder than you’d think), and a few developer-side tricks for grabbing the count programmatically.

How to See the Word Count in the Block Editor

In the modern block editor (Gutenberg), word count lives in the document overview panel. To open it:

1. Open any post or page in the editor.
2. Click the document overview icon at the very top-left of the editor (the icon that looks like three horizontal lines stacked next to each other).
3. Click the Outline tab inside the panel that opens.

The Outline panel shows six stats:

• Words: the total word count of the current post or page
• Characters: total character count including spaces
• Headings: how many H1-H6 headings exist in the content
• Paragraphs: how many paragraph blocks
• Blocks: total block count (paragraphs, headings, images, lists, all of them)
• Time to read: estimated reading time at ~250 words per minute

The same panel doubles as a navigation outline of every heading in your post, which is genuinely useful on long articles where jumping to a specific H2 saves scrolling.

Word Count and Estimated Reading Time

The “time to read” estimate WordPress shows next to the word count uses a fixed assumption of roughly 250 words per minute. That’s a rough average for English prose; technical writing reads slower (closer to 200 wpm), light fiction reads faster (closer to 300 wpm).

If you want to display reading time on the front end of your site for visitors, you can calculate it yourself with the same 250 wpm convention. See the “How to Display Word Count on the Front End” section below for a working PHP snippet that handles both word count and read time.

Word Count in the Classic Editor

If you’re still using the Classic Editor plugin, the word count is right at the bottom-left of the editor window, updating live as you type.

No clicks required. The classic editor just shows it. This is the same place TinyMCE displays word count by default and has worked the same way since WordPress 2.5.

Site-Wide Word Count Across Every Post

The block editor and classic editor both show the count for the post you’re currently editing. If you want a total word count across your entire site, or the average post length, or to sort posts by word count, you need a plugin.

The WP Word Count plugin is the most popular option. After installation, it adds a “Word Count” screen under the Tools menu that shows total word counts for posts, pages, custom post types, and individual authors. It can sort your content by word count so you can find your longest (or shortest) posts at a glance.

The free version covers basic stats; a paid pro version adds reading-time analytics and per-author breakdowns.

If you don’t want to install a plugin, you can also get the same data from WP-CLI (see the developer section below) or by writing a one-off function that loops through every post and runs str_word_count() on each.

How to Display Word Count on the Front End of Your Posts

If you want visitors to see the word count or estimated reading time on your posts (common for long-form blogs and publications), drop this snippet into your theme’s functions.php file or a custom plugin:

function smartwp_get_word_count() {
    $content    = get_post_field( 'post_content', get_the_ID() );
    $word_count = str_word_count( strip_tags( $content ) );
    return $word_count;
}

function smartwp_reading_time() {
    $word_count = smartwp_get_word_count();
    $minutes    = ceil( $word_count / 250 );
    return $minutes . ' min read';
}

Then call either function inside your post template (or a shortcode, or a block pattern):

<p>Word count: <?php echo smartwp_get_word_count(); ?></p>
<p><?php echo smartwp_reading_time(); ?></p>

A few notes on the snippet:

• strip_tags() removes HTML before counting, so block markup and inline tags don’t inflate the count.
• str_word_count() is PHP’s built-in word counter; it splits on whitespace, which gives results very close to what the block editor reports.
• The reading-time calculation rounds up with ceil() so a 251-word post shows “2 min read” rather than “1 min read.”
• Shortcodes ([contact-form], etc.) get counted as words by default. If you want to exclude them, run strip_shortcodes() before counting.

How WordPress Counts Words (and What It Misses)

The block editor uses the official @wordpress/wordcount JavaScript package to compute word counts. It’s slightly more sophisticated than a simple “split on spaces” approach:

• Counts as words: normal English-style words separated by spaces, hyphenated compound words (well-known counts as one word), contractions (don’t is one word).
• Doesn’t count: HTML tags, URLs in href attributes, image alt text, block markup syntax.
• Counts oddly: shortcodes are counted ([contact-form-7] is one “word”), embedded URLs in paragraph text count as words, and numbers count as words (a date like May 24, 2026 counts as three words).

The package supports three counting strategies: words (default), characters_excluding_spaces, and characters_including_spaces. For Chinese, Japanese, and Korean text where spaces don’t mark word boundaries the same way, it falls back to a character-based count automatically.

The small differences between editors matter most when you’re optimizing content for specific word-count targets (Yoast’s “minimum X words” warnings, freelance writing rates per word, SEO content briefs that specify a target). The block editor count is canonical; everything else is an approximation.

Get Word Count via WP-CLI (Developer Method)

If you have shell access to your server, WP-CLI gives you the fastest way to grab word counts for any post, or for every post in your site, without touching the admin:

# Word count for a single post by ID
wp post get 123 --field=post_content | wc -w

# Word count for every published post on the site
wp post list --post_type=post --post_status=publish --field=ID | \
  xargs -I {} sh -c 'echo "Post {}: $(wp post get {} --field=post_content | wc -w) words"'

# Total words across all posts
wp post list --post_type=post --post_status=publish --field=ID | \
  xargs -I {} wp post get {} --field=post_content | wc -w

These pipe the raw post content through wc -w (the standard Unix word count utility), so the results include HTML tags as “words.” For cleaner numbers, pipe through sed 's/<[^>]*>//g' first to strip tags.

Frequently Asked Questions

Wrapping Up

For most writers, the document overview icon in the block editor is all you’ll ever need. For site-wide stats, the WP Word Count plugin handles totals across every post. For developers who want to show word count or reading time to visitors, the PHP snippet above is a drop-in solution that works with any theme.

For more dev-side WordPress utilities and helpers, see our 15 useful WordPress code snippets, the functions.php guide, and our WP-CLI commands reference.