How to Count All Posts in a Category in WordPress

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August 20, 2023

If you’re a WordPress user looking to gather important data about your website, such as the number of posts in a specific category, you’ve come to the right place. Counting all posts in a category can be useful for tracking your content growth, analyzing popular topics, or even organizing your site’s content more effectively. In this article, we will guide you through the process of counting all the posts in a category in WordPress, so you can easily access the information you need.

					function wpturbo_count_posts_in_category($category_slug) {
    $category = get_category_by_slug($category_slug);
    $category_id = $category->term_id;
    $count = get_term($category_id, 'category')->count;
    return $count;
}

The code snippet above defines a function called wpturbo_count_posts_in_category() that allows you to count the number of posts in a specific category in WordPress.

Here’s how it works step-by-step:

First, the function takes a parameter $category_slug, which represents the slug of the category for which you want to count the posts.
Inside the function, we use the get_category_by_slug() function, passing in the $category_slug as the parameter, to retrieve the category object associated with the given slug.
We then access the term_id property of the category object to obtain the category ID, which is required to count the posts in the next step.
Next, we use the get_term() function to retrieve the term object for the given $category_id and specify the taxonomy as 'category'. This function returns an object that contains various properties related to the term.
Among the properties of the term object, we specifically access the count property, which represents the number of posts assigned to the category.
Finally, the function returns the count, which can be assigned to a variable or used directly in your code.

To use this function, you would pass the slug of the category you want to count the posts for as an argument. For example, if you want to count the posts in the category "example-category", you would call the function like this: wpturbo_count_posts_in_category('example-category');. The function will then return the count of posts in that category, which you can use as needed in your code.

How to Count All Posts in a Category in WordPress

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