July 12, 2024

Just Writing Statistics Plugin

Calculate your writing statistics on your WordPress site.

Just Writing Statistics is a fork of WP Word Count

Just Writing Statistics tells you exactly how many words you’ve written on your site with statistics by:

Top Content
All Content
Month
Year (new)
Author
Tags (new)
Categories (new)

Just Writing Statistics also has reading times for each post and page of your site. Find out how many hours of content you’ve written or let readers know how long your articles are. You can include reading time at the top of each of your posts automatically or use a shortcode.

Features

Quickly see how many posts and pages you’ve created and how many total words they add up to.
View and display estimated reading times for each piece of content on your site.
Support for custom post types so you can monitor word counts from content created by your themes and plugins.
View your writing output for each month broken down by post type.
See all of your site author’s word counts with breakdowns by post type.

Installation

Upload just-writing-statistics to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
Just Writing Statistics can be accessed via the menu of the WordPress Admin.

Screenshots

Top Content Statistics
Monthly Statistics
Author Statistics
Tag Statistics
Settings

FAQ

Why fork WP Word Count?

UPDATE
WP Word Count is back on the plugin directory, but still seems to be getting very little attention from the developers.

Since I’ve already done all the work to fork it and publish it in the plugin directory, I’ll continue to support this version going forward.

Also Just Writing Statistics has a lot of features that were only included in the Pro version of WP Word Count, so there’s that too.

WP Word Count is by far the best plugin of its kind, however it is, as far as I can tell, abandoned at this point.

Even worse, the existing plugin has a known security vulnerability in it and so wordpress.org has closed the repository.

As such, a fork is required to fix the security issue and bring the plugin functionality back.

I’ve got a very large site, how’s the performance going to be?

Statistics are inherently resource intensive, the large your site is, the slower the statistic generation will be.

For the general content/monthly/yearly/author based statistics, these should remain quick to display no matter the site size as a custom table is used to gather the data whenever a item is saved.

For Tags and Categories this is not the case and these are calculated at display time. Even with a largish site, this should not be significant, a few seconds at worst. If this becomes an issue I’ll look into converting this code over to a custom table as well.

Why do I see post types in the settings tab that I don’t see on any of the statistics tabs?

If a post type has no items associated with it, Just Writing Statistics will not include it in the statistic displays.

Do I really have to calculate the statistics by date range?

Probably not, but make sure to wait for the progress bar to disappear before reloading the page. If it is running for more than five minutes, then it’s failed silently and you’ll need to break up the calculation into chunks.

However, even on a modest hosting provider, it would take hundreds of thousands (maybe millions) of posts to get to this point.

How do the Just Writing Statistics Shortcodes work?

There are two shortcodes available:

[just-writing-statistics] will display the number of words on any page or post.
[just-writing-statistics-reading-time] will display the reading time of words on any page or post.

Every Just Writing Statistics shortcode can be extended with “before” and “after” attributes to add text or HTML before and after the result.

Example: [just-writing-statistics before=”This post has” after=” total words.”]

Changelog

4.7

Release date: July 11, 2024
Add support for rlt languages in the admin screens.
Add colour to the charts for authors.

4.6

Release date: April 27, 2024
Fixed debug warning.
Added filtering of reading time output (both for shortcodes and when added to top of post content) to limit to only supported post html (aka strip out scripts and other unwanted html, see wp_kses_post() for details).

4.5

Release date: January 31, 2024
Fixed incorrect calculation of monthly/yearly/author item counts.

4.4

Release date: January 15, 2024
Added option to disable plugin based on WordPress roles

4.3

Release date: Dec 14, 2023
Fixed possible null error on some stat pages
Fixed display of datepicker element when regenerating statistics for a date range
Fixed missing yearly statistics for some data due to incorrect variable name

4.2

Release date: April 25, 2023
Fixed incorrect wordcount when a post has no text content
Improved I18N, thanks @alexclassroom

4.1

Release date: Jan 20, 2023
Added word count column to admin post/pages list
Fixed various WP_DEBUG warnings
Fixed total boxes on top/all content page from showing post types that were marked as excluded
Fixed total boxes arranging correctly on small screens
Moved table titles into the table headers to fix corner cases where they were shorter than the table under them
Misc settings cleanups

4.0

Release date: Dec 28, 2022
Tested up to WordPress 6.1.1
Fork from WP Word Count
Security fixes
Removal of Pro references
Fix the menu icon
Fix the settings link in the plugin list
Fix various wp_debug warnings
Added yearly statistics
Added tag statistics
Added category statistics
Combined Read Time and Calculate into a Settings tab
Added about tab
Add graphs to the statistic tabs
Added scheduled posts as a grouping for statistics separate from unpublished
Added setting to exclude post types

3.2.3

Release date: 6 Oct 2021
Tested up to WordPress 5.8.1
We’ve been a bit quiet (sorry!), but busy behind the scenes! Get ready for some new features ready in Q4 2021!

3.2.2

Release date: 8 Sept 2020
Tested up to WordPress 5.5.1

3.2.1

Release date: 2 June 2020
Tested up to WordPress 5.4.1
Updated plugin details

3.2.0

Release date: 2 Jan 2020
New “Reading Time” statistic throughout the plugin.
Added support for Gravatar/User Profile Images.

3.1.0

Release date: 8 Sept 2019
New calculation options for sites with extremely large amounts of content.
Menu changes.

3.0.2

Release date: 12 Apr 2019
Interface changes.

3.0.1

Release date: 13 Sept 2018
Interface changes and bug fixes.

3.0.0

Release date: 21 Feb 2017
You can calculate your word counts any time you wish via the “Calculate” tab. This should help alleviate problems with plugin activation/updating on servers with limited resources.
Automatically excluding common WordPress post types: Custom CSS, Navigation Menu Items.
Support for Scheduled Posts.
Support for Thrive Content Builder.
Interface changes.
General bug fixes.