How many characters per a page is normal?
About the Author
Mike Rogers is a Web Developer who is currently at University studying Web Technologies. He also is the founder of Full On Design. He has several years experience freelancing and you can follow him on Twitter (Rogem002).
As the title suggests, in this brief study I’m going to try and find out how many words, paragraphs and characters is normal for a web page.
Below is an overview of the results I obtained from a bot I wrote (Which analyses web page content*):
| Words Per a page | Characters Per a Page | Paragraphs | Characters per a Word | Words Per a paragraph | |
| BBC News – #1 | 402.00 | 2,000.00 | 10.00 | 4.98 | 200.00 |
| BBC News – #2 | 764.00 | 3,476.00 | 17.00 | 4.55 | 204.47 |
| BBC News – #3 | 663.00 | 3,359.00 | 34.00 | 5.07 | 98.79 |
| LA Times – #1 | 943.00 | 4,904.00 | 30.00 | 5.20 | 163.47 |
| LA Times – #2 | 1,045.00 | 5,163.00 | 20.00 | 4.94 | 258.15 |
| Yahoo News – #1 | 524.00 | 2,565.00 | 15.00 | 4.90 | 171.00 |
| Breitbart.com – #1 | 319.00 | 1,576.00 | 11.00 | 4.94 | 143.27 |
| Average (News Sites) | 665.71 | 3,291.86 | 19.57 | 4.94 | 177.02 |
| Mashable – #1 | 222.00 | 1,083.00 | 4.00 | 4.88 | 270.75 |
| Mashable – #2 | 710.00 | 3,703.00 | 9.00 | 5.22 | 411.44 |
| Average (Blog) | 466.00 | 2,393.00 | 6.50 | 5.05 | 341.10 |
| Wikipedia – #1 | 5,241.00 | 28,681.00 | 45.00 | 5.47 | 637.36 |
| Wikipedia – #2 | 2,757.00 | 14,415.00 | 34.00 | 5.23 | 423.97 |
| Average (Information) | 3,999.00 | 21,548.00 | 39.50 | 5.35 | 530.66 |
| WMT Post – #1 | 85.00 | 342.00 | 1.00 | 4.02 | 342.00 |
| WMT Post – #2 | 472.00 | 2,240.00 | 6.00 | 4.75 | 373.33 |
| Average (Forum) | 278.50 | 1,291.00 | 3.50 | 4.38 | 357.67 |
| Average (Overall) | 1,204.86 | 6,296.24 | 18.85 | 4.97 | 296.67 |
So overall, the average number of words per a page is about 1,200 and the number of letters per a word should average out to roughly 5. However, this number various depending on the web page type and target audience.
*The content analysed excludes navgation, headers and footers.