WordPress Word Count Function

Ever wondered how to count the number of words in one of your WordPress posts?

Out of the box WordPress doesn’t include a function to do this, but it’s not hard to do.  Just add a custom function to your child theme’s functions.php.

function wordCount() {
    $data = get_post_field( 'post_content', $post->ID );
    $wordCount = str_word_count(strip_tags($data));
    return $wordCount;
}

Now anywhere in your page templates that you would like to echo out your post word count you can using the following command.

echo wordCount();