We obtain the boundedness in $L^p$ spaces for all $1<p<\infty$ of the so-called vertical Littlewood--Paley functions for non-local Dirichlet forms in the metric measure space under some mild assumptions. For $1<p\le 2$, the pseudo-gradient is introduced to overcome the difficulty that chain rules are not available for non-local operators, and then the Mosco convergence is used to pave the way from the finite jumping kernel case to the general case, while for $2\le p<\infty$, the Burkholder--Davis--Gundy inequality is effectively applied. The former method is analytic and the latter one is probabilistic. The results extend those ones for pure jump symmetric Lévy processes in Euclidean spaces.