WordPress – Simple Post Views Counter Plugin

WP-PostViews is a free plugin by Lester Chan that counts views for each post. Installing and activating the plugin begins the tracking, but it’s up to you to add code to your theme somewhere to display the view count. No offense to Lester, but the documentation left a little to be figured out. What I mean by this is that it doesn’t explain how it works or what it counts as a view. With a little testing I figured out that it only counts the view when someone loads the full post. Even if the entire text of the post is seen on the main page – meaning that you didn’t use the “more” tag – it won’t increment the view count unless the post is loaded by itself. This gives misleading results because if the entire post is on your main page it’s unlikely that anyone will click through. Therefore even a popular post could show only a few views. This is something that I might try to fix eventually.

Of course counters like this one are only good to give you an idea of traffic. They can’t be considered as technically accurate because of bots, self-inflicted views, and reloads. Some would argue that it’s just for the novelty of watching the number get bigger and feeling good that people are reading your blog. However, I’m using it as a metric to see overall traffic trends and see what types of posts are more popular.

Based on the documentation, the code to show the view count on each post has to be manually added to your theme. In your wordpress dashboard go to the Theme Editor under the Design tab:

The highlighted code above is what I added. It checks to see if a function called ‘the_views’ exists and if so it is launched. That function displays your view count based on the options you’ve set up. Where the count shows within your post block is determined by where you place this code. It is up to you to figure out the proper placement and will be different depending on your theme. It just has to be somewhere inside the main loop where posts are displayed. Through trial and error I’ve settled on placing it right below the tags and right above the comments link. I also put <div>’s around it so that it will be on it’s own line.

Of course this only places the count on the posts as they display on your main index (your home page). You also have to add this code to the script that is used for single posts and pages. For my theme they were called single.php, and page.php.

Now to the mod. The initial thing I didn’t like about the plugin is that if a post had zero views it showed “Views: 0”. It should be impossible to have zero views because you have to view it to see the 0. Even the first viewer should see “Views: 1” as they are the FIRST viewer. Clearly it is incrementing the counter after showing the counter. Maybe Lester or someone else can chime in the comments and tell me if I’m doing something wrong. But from from what I can tell, since it only increments the counter when the full post is loaded, the value will be zero when seen on the main page until someone clicks through to the see the full post.

I don’t like seeing Views: 0 and would rather not see anything at all until it has a value. So the mod I did was to only show the “Views:….” if the count is at least 1. You could have it not show the number until it’s over 10 (or some other threshold). Not being an expert PHP programmer I just guessed at how to change the code.

Editing a plugin is done via the Plugin Edior found under the Plugins Tab:

Editing plugins can be dangerous. If you cause a program error the plugin will disable itself – which could have some repercussions that I don’t know about. The highlighted text in the above image shows the code I changed. Originally the highlighted code was only:

echo $output;

By adding the if($post_views > 0) { …. } around the echo I disabled the echo when the number of views is zero. If you wanted to only show the count when it reaches a higher number, just replace that zero with your threshold.