I came across this problem recently and I didn’t actually manage to find a solution online for a change so I thought I had better post about it. All of a sudden the word count in my WordPress site was showing zero on every post.
I thought maybe it was a problem in my browser so I checked some of my other sites and they were working fine. I also checked the affected site in another browser and it was still showing zero for the word count.
So this made me think it was something to do with the site itself. As I say, I couldn’t find any applicable solutions (or in fact anything recent) so I tried to figure out what had changed on my site recently.
One thing I had done was to add in a new theme (although I had not activated it), but as I couldn’t actually delete that theme unless I went in to file manager (and the fact that I actually wanted to use it) I thought I would look and see if it was anything else before reverting to that option.
What I did then was to make sure any plugins I had installed and that I was not using, were not active. I must have deactivated about 5 plugins I think (OK yes I should probably delete them if I’m not using them!) and then checked again.
Result, this time my word count was back and i no longer had to guess how many words I was posting in each article.
For the record I think it may have been an import posts plugin that I installed as that was the most recent one and I likely would have noticed the word count being zero quite soon after it had happened as I always keep an eye on my word count for SEO purposes.
Anyway, at least the problem is fixed and from what I have heard, plugins are often the cause of minor malfunctions so I’ll have to keep a good eye on what I install.