The General settings of Post Views Counter contain essential options for how the plugin works with particular attention to the methods of counting them, the type of content counted and the types of visitors whose visits will be taken into account.
Post Types Count
This option allows you to specify what types of posts will be counted. It includes all public post types currently available on your site.
Taxonomies Count pro
If available, this option allows you to specify what taxonomies will be counted. It includes all registered taxonomies, including categories and tags.
Authors Count pro
If available, this option allows you to count visits of author archives.
Others Count pro
If available, allows you to specify what other types of pages present in WordPress will be counted. When you enable it, pages such as post type archives, date archives, 404 pages, search page and also the homepage of your site in case it’s not the front page being selected as homepage in WordPress reading settings.
Counter Mode
One of the most important settings for how the entire plug-in works. It decides what technical method will be used as a mechanism for counting visits. Influences the speed and relevance of statistics depending on the specifics of the website.
It contains 4 possible options and these are:
PHP
The most standard method, relying on server-side counting, accurate when we have, a simple, traditionally built site, without many components, and especially without caching enabled.
JavaScript
A method involving client-side JavaScript support for counting. It can be described as universal and good for many websites. It is one of the three methods recommended when using caching.
REST API
This is an alternative method especially to JavaScript. It is based on the same technique, but is more modern. It can be faster (and therefore may be more accurate) because it uses direct requests to the REST API.
Fast AJAX pro
This is our recommended method especially for more complex sites or those with higher traffic. Thanks to this unique solution, any data communication such as recording page visits is much faster than in any other methods (in our tests, even 5 to 10 times faster, depending on the site!). Thanks to this, the data is not lost and the collected statistics are most accurate.
Data Storage pro
When a visitor enters your website, information about what page they visited and when is stored in their browser. This allows you to control when a particular page view is taken into account. This option decides whether the data that is then saved will be stored in cookies.
AMP Support pro
Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is an open-source project aimed at speeding up the loading of web pages on mobile devices by simplifying web content and utilizing Google’s servers for caching. Enabling this option, in conjunction with the official Google AMP support plugin for WordPress makes it so that visits to site pages generated in this way will also be counted.
Restrict Edit
The Post Views Counter plugin is equipped with a special functionality that allows you to manually set the total number of visits to a given post from the edit screen. Thanks to the Restrict Edit option, you can limit the ability to use it to your site’s administrators only.
Admin Column
This option adds a column to the list of posts and other counted content types in the WordPress admin dashboard that displays the view count for each post. This feature allows website administrators and editors to quickly see the number of views each post has received directly from the dashboard, without needing to open each post individually.
Count Interval
The Count interval option specifies the time interval over which page views of a given page from the same user (same browser on a given device) will be counted. This setting helps prevent the number of views from being inflated by repeated views from the same user over a short period of time. But it can be used in whatever way is appropriate from your perspective.
Cleanup Interval
Cleanup interval option refers to a scheduled interval in which the plugin automatically cleans the entries in the database. This cleaning process includes deleting daily data related to post views and other content to optimize the database and ensure efficient operation of the plugin.
Important: only daily data is deleted – annual, monthly, weekly data and total page views are left untouched because their amount is relatively small and should not affect the performance of the database in any way.
Object Cache Support pro
Object caching is a method that stores database query results so that the next time the same query is made, the results can be served from the cache rather than requiring a new database lookup. This reduces the load on the database and can significantly speed up website performance, especially on sites with high traffic or complex queries.
When the Object Cache Support option is enabled, the plugin takes advantage of this caching mechanism to store and retrieve view counts. This means that when a post’s view count is updated or fetched, the plugin will first check the object cache to see if the data is available there, reducing the need for direct database queries and thereby enhancing the site’s responsiveness and scalability.
The ability to use object caching is dependent on the environment in which a given website is installed and the presence of one of the two most common technologies for this purpose, namely Redis or Memcached. You will, by the way, be informed about this in the option, within the “Current status” field.
Exclude Visitors
With this option, you can exclude particular groups of users from counting so that they do not distort your site’s statistics. You have the following options to choose from:
- Robots – visitors to your site identified as web robots
- Logged in Users – visitors who browse your website after logging in
- Guests – visitors who browse your website without logging in
- Selected User Roles – logged in users with specific user roles; when you select this option, a list of all registered user roles will appear for you to choose from
Exclude IPs
With this option you can exclude visitors to the site from selected IP numbers. It is usually a good idea to add your own IP address as the site administrator, possibly addresses of other people managing the site, or any IP addresses from which you do not want to take visits into account.
Strict Counts pro
This option is designed to increase the accuracy of view counting by applying stricter filtering rules and verifying views before counting them. When this option is enabled, the counting mechanism becomes stricter and does not rely solely on the browsing history stored in the user’s browser but additionally saves information about the viewed pages in the database. This allows you to have extra confidence that the generated visit counts are authentic. Note that to minimize resource usage and speed, only the last one thousand visit histories are saved.