How to display number of page views on a post?

Question

Is there any currently supported plugin to display the number of page views on a post? wp-postviews seems to be the most commonly used, but it requires modifying the theme (which would require creating a child theme to avoid being overwritten by theme updates), and does not seem to work with caching plug-ins.

It seems like this should be straight-forward to extend the wp-statistics / jetpack API to display this information, but I haven't found a plugin that will do so. Seems like a common feature, surely this has been done somewhere?

Answer 1

Try this Works on single site

// post views
function setAndViewPostViews($postID) {
    $count_key = 'views';
    $count = get_post_meta($postID, $count_key, true);
    if($count==''){
        $count = 0;
        delete_post_meta($postID, $count_key);
        add_post_meta($postID, $count_key, '0');
    }else{
        $count++;
        update_post_meta($postID, $count_key, $count);
    }
    return $count; /* so you can show it */
}

You need to add the following function to your theme's functions.php and call it inside the loop or inside your posts.php or page.php of your theme. like so

<?php echo setAndViewPostViews(get_the_ID());  ?>

This will increment and persist the post's count then show the number of views.

Got inspiration from the question and did a write up if it might help anyone http://nerudo.mregi.com/how-to-display-number-of-page-views-on-a-post-wp/

Answer 2

wp-postviews seems to be the most commonly used, but it requires modifying the theme (which would require creating a child theme to avoid being overwritten by theme updates) ...

If you want to actually display the view count on the post but this item isn't built in to your theme already, then you're going to have to edit your theme or create a child theme. There's no way around that.

...and does not seem to work with caching plug-ins.

If you're wanting to display a dynamic view count on a post, using caching isn't necessarily a good idea.

Most caching systems return static HTML content in place of a dynamically-generated page. This means the counter wouldn't increment with each page load unless you force the cache to refresh at a set interval ... and then the counter would only chance when that refresh occurred.

Seems like a common feature, surely this has been done somewhere?

It has, and you've already found one of the ways people have been doing it - WP-PostViews

There are a few other plugins out there that do the same thing, since you've already found one I assume you can find the others pretty quickly as well.

Answer 3

Using WP-PostViews with Ajax-the-Views and a child theme for both the index.php and single.php files of my theme is the best solution I have at the moment.

Pity that this does not call the wp-stats API with my API key, so that the counters would not start at zero but reflect the history stored by the stats plugin.

Thanks @EAMann for suggestions, and happy to hear of other solutions.