Word & Character Counter
Paste or type your text — word count, character count, sentences, paragraphs and reading time update live. Free, no signup, works offline.
Top words
Free Online Word Counter — Fast, Accurate & Private
FastWordCount is a free online word counter and character counter that updates in real time as you type or paste. Whether you're writing a blog post, an essay, a tweet, a meta description or a novel chapter — knowing your exact word count and character count helps you hit your target every time.
Everything runs in your browser. Your text is never uploaded to any server, never logged, and never stored anywhere other than your own device. Paste freely.
What FastWordCount measures
- Word count — total words, updated live as you type
- Character count — total characters including spaces
- Character count without spaces — useful for platform limits and translation estimates
- Sentence count — number of sentences detected in your text
- Paragraph count — number of paragraphs separated by blank lines
- Reading time — estimated minutes to read at average adult reading speed (238 wpm)
- Word frequency — top words ranked by how often they appear, with a visual density bar
- Character density — ratio of non-space characters to total characters
Who uses a word counter?
- Students & academics — hit essay word limits, track dissertation chapters, stay within abstract maximums
- SEO writers & bloggers — aim for 1,500–2,500 words for top-ranking blog posts, check keyword frequency
- Social media managers — stay within Twitter/X (280 chars), Instagram captions, LinkedIn posts
- Copywriters — keep Google Ads headlines under 30 chars, meta descriptions under 160 chars
- Authors & novelists — track chapter length, monitor daily writing progress
- Translators — estimate project size and cost by word or character count
- Developers — check string length for database fields, UI labels, API limits
Character limits for common platforms
- Google meta description — 160 characters
- Google page title — 60 characters
- Twitter / X post — 280 characters
- Instagram caption — 2,200 characters
- LinkedIn post — 3,000 characters
- Facebook post — 63,206 characters
- Google Ads headline — 30 characters
- Google Ads description — 90 characters
- YouTube title — 100 characters
- YouTube description — 5,000 characters
- SMS text message — 160 characters
Word count targets for SEO content
Search engines favour content that thoroughly covers a topic. Research consistently shows that top-ranking pages for competitive informational queries average between 1,500 and 2,500 words. FastWordCount helps you track your word count as you write so you can hit your target before publishing — without counting manually or switching apps.
- Short blog post — 500–800 words
- Standard blog post — 1,000–1,500 words
- Long-form SEO article — 1,500–2,500 words
- Pillar / cornerstone content — 3,000–5,000 words
- Product page — 300–500 words
- Landing page — 500–1,000 words