In recent years, researchers have been interested to implement computational circuits by nanotechnology since it has many attractive advantages. Quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) is one of the most attractive and profitable nanotechnology that was first proposed in 1993. A design of ring counter was introduced in 2008 for the first time. After that, a 4-bit counter based on ring counter, was proposed. Both of the designs have some shortages. At first, counting cannot be controlled by an input signal. They start to count whenever the device is turned on. Second, they have a long initialization delay. For a 4-bit counter of the second layout, initialization delay is 16 complete clock cycles. We have developed a more complicated and progressive design of 3-bit counter that could simply be extended to more than 3 bits. It is a major improvement compared to the previous works.