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.
This is great information. I have a couple of questions.
1. What text is included? For example, does the bot filter out all the navigation text?
2. Have you gotten any information about other kinds of sites, e-commerce, for example?
Great job though – very interesting.