Page Word Count & Readability

Paste the page's URL into a tool like this one and it fetches the live HTML, strips out the navigation, code and markup, and counts the words in the actual body content. That's more accurate than copying and pasting into a document, because it ignores menus, footers and scripts that aren't really part of the article. Alongside the word count you also get sentence count, paragraph count, and character counts both with and without spaces.

Flesch Reading Ease runs from 0 to 100, and higher means easier to read. For most web content and blogs, aim for roughly 60-70, which reads at an 8th-9th grade level and suits a general audience; scores of 70+ are very easy, while anything under 50 is fairly difficult and usually means long sentences or complex vocabulary. The score is driven by average sentence length and syllables per word, so shortening sentences and using plainer words is the fastest way to raise it.

Reading time is the page's word count divided by an average silent reading speed. This tool uses 238 words per minute, which is a well-cited average for adults reading on screen, so a 1,200-word article comes out to about 5 minutes. It's an estimate rather than an exact figure, since dense or technical content is read more slowly than casual prose.

Best practice is exactly one H1 per page, used for the main heading, with H2s and H3s for subsections beneath it. Multiple H1s (or zero) usually come from a theme or page builder that wraps several elements in H1 tags, which muddies the page's heading hierarchy for both users and search engines. This tool flags the count so you can spot it; if you see more than one, fix the template so only the main title is an H1 and demote the rest to H2/H3.

Run their URL through a word-count check to get a baseline of the current word, sentence and paragraph counts, then re-run it later and compare. The catch is that doing this manually means remembering to check and eyeballing the difference. SiteGauge can monitor a page for you and alert the moment text is added, removed or rewritten, with a before/after diff and an AI summary of exactly what changed, so you don't have to keep re-checking by hand.