Translation is quoted per word, so the first number in every website translation project is how many words the site has. Almost nobody knows it, and the guesses are consistently low, because the words people picture are the body copy and the words that get invoiced are everything: navigation, footers, form labels, buttons, error messages, transactional emails and the alt text nobody has looked at since launch.
What a typical page actually holds
Marketing pages tend to run three hundred to six hundred words; documentation runs longer; a product page in a catalogue may be under a hundred. That range is why an average taken across the whole site is misleading and an average per template is not. Take five pages of each kind, count them, and keep the groups separate.
Count the shared chrome once
Menus, footers, cookie banners, form labels and buttons are translated once and reused across every page, so counting them per page inflates the estimate enormously. Take them as a single block, add them to the total, and keep them out of the per-page average.
Multiply by locales, not by pages
The number that goes into a quote is pages times average words plus the chrome block, all multiplied by the number of target languages. This is where estimates diverge from invoices, because people size the source site and forget that they are buying it several times over.
Then take out the machine-translated share
What remains is the human word count, which is what a translator or agency is actually quoting on if you are post-editing. The scope sheet on this site does the whole calculation from five inputs and gives you a number to put in a brief.
Questions people ask about how many words are in a page
Is there a quick way to count a site's words?
A crawl gives you a total, and it will include navigation on every page. For a quote you want the per-template average plus the chrome counted once.
Should alt text and meta descriptions be counted?
Yes. They are words that have to be translated, they are usually forgotten, and on a large site they are not a rounding error.
What about words in images?
Count them separately and expect them to cost more, because somebody has to remake the image rather than type a sentence.