How to View Word Counts of All WordPress Posts

How can you find the word count of all WordPress posts in a easy interface? Word Counts are important indication of article length and are useful if you are looking for thin content on your Google penalty affected site.

WordPress displays the WordPress count beneath the post edit screen, but when you want to find the low word count posts to improve them, there has to be a better way than sifting through each article.

Find Word Counts

Then I found the Post Admin Word Count plugin which simply adds a  new column with word counts in front of each post in the WordPress admin.

So if I go to my WordPress Admin posts screen, I can easily see the word counts of my posts.

Word Counts

The actual power of the plugin starts when you can sort the posts by decreasing word counts. This lets us find the posts with the least word counts.

Low word counts

Why Find Low Word Counts?

What benefit would you get to find low word count posts? Most probably it is some quick newsy post, video post or a highlighted image with low text content. As we are all aware, that it is a good idea to have at least a few hundred  words post for search engines to output your link in search results.

What is the magic number for words which will help your article rank higher? There is no magic number and it is more about conveying great original content in optimal number of words.

Most experts believe that long form copy is better to get good rankings, but it does not mean you create rubbish content of 2000 words and it will rank higher. Some advise that less than 200 words might be classified as thin content, and too long content might not work either.

Thin content is an easy way to invite Google Panda penalties to your site. If your site is affected by Panda penalty, a content audit might involve finding poor word count posts and improving them, and this plugin comes handy.

Poor Word Count = Thin Content?

So what is labelled as thin content by Google – it is much more than just word content as explained in this video.

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About the Author: P Chandra is editor of QOT, one of India's earliest tech bloggers since 2004. A tech enthusiast with expertise in coding, WordPress, web tools, SEO and DIY hacks.