Just Writing Statistics
View on WordPress.orgScores higher than 2% of indexed plugins
About
Calculate your writing statistics on your WordPress site.
Security History
What It Does
Just Writing Statistics calculates writing metrics such as word counts and reading times for posts on your WordPress site. It tags content with relevant terms like 'word-count', 'reading-time', and 'authors', allowing writers to display or track their output. In practice, it gives authors a dashboard-style view of how much they have written and how long it will take readers to consume.
Who It's For
This plugin is a reasonable fit for solo bloggers, freelance writers, and small editorial teams who want a lightweight way to track writing volume or show reading times to visitors. It suits sites where the author themselves is the primary audience for the statistics rather than site-wide analytics.
Who Should Skip It
If you run a multi-author publishing operation or need detailed author bios, bylines, and guest contributor management, skip this plugin in favour of a dedicated author tool like Co-Authors Plus or PublishPress Authors. Anyone who just needs a reading time estimate will also find simpler, single-purpose plugins sufficient.
The Bottom Line
Just Writing Statistics delivers a narrow, focused tool for tracking word counts and reading times, and its recent update is a positive signal, but the tiny install base, minimal ratings sample, and absent support footprint keep it from feeling reliable for serious publishers. It is a fine pick for hobbyists curious about their writing output, yet most professional sites will outgrow it quickly. Overall quality sits at 50.71/100, putting it below the alternatives listed.
Related Plugins
Pick this when you need to assign multiple bylines per post and want a mature, widely deployed solution with 20,000 installs.
Choose this if you want rich author boxes, guest author support, and integration with the broader PublishPress editorial suite.
Opt for this on Genesis-framework sites where author profile pages and widgets are the priority over raw writing stats.
Select this if your primary need is paying writers based on word counts or views rather than just displaying statistics.
Go with this when you need admin-side word count columns you can sort and filter across many posts, which Just Writing Statistics does not emphasize.