How to Count All Words on a Webpage with Vanilla JavaScript

Learn how to count all words on a specific part of a website with Vanilla JavaScript.

Sometimes it’s useful to count all the words on a post or page. Are you building a Word Counter feature for your website? You can use the following JavaScript code snippet to do exactly that — and fast.

var wordsInPost = wordCount(document.querySelectorAll(".posts-content"))

function wordCount(words) {
  var count = 0
  for (var i = 0; i < words.length; i++) {
    count += words[i].textContent.split(" ").length
  }
  return count
}

console.log(wordsInPost)

Copy and paste the JS code into your browser console to test it on any website. Just make sure you target the right selector.

What the JavaScript function does

• It counts all the words within your target element. In the example above, we target a .post-content class selector.
• The word count includes all text elements (headings, paragraphs, lists, blockquotes etc.). Everything relevant.
• It excludes whitespace, commas etc.

How to use the JavaScript function

• Replace the .post-content class with whatever class, id, or element selector you have for your posts or pages.

Note: you can use getElementsByClassName() instead of querySelectorAll().

You test can with the code in your favorite browser’s console, or on this CodePen.