Hopcount Click Tracking

Hopcount Click Tracking records how often visitors click the outbound and affiliate links in your posts and pages, and shows the totals in wp-admin. It does this without redirecting or cloaking anything: your links keep their real href. If you already use cloaked links on your own site (Redirection, Pretty Links, ThirstyAffiliates, a server rule), those are followed and counted under their real destination too, best-effort.

What it stores

• Hourly click counts per link. That is the whole data model: no per-click rows, no IP addresses, no user agents, no referrers, no user IDs, no cookies.
• Which post each link appeared in, the destination URL and its host, and the link text (used as an automatic label).

There is nothing to anonymise and nothing to disclose in a privacy policy beyond “aggregate click counts are kept”.

How it works

1. When a post renders, eligible outbound links get a short server-generated token attribute. Ordinary links to your own site (and any hosts you list as internal) are skipped. A same-site link that your site answers with an off-site redirect (a cloaked affiliate link) is treated as outbound and tracked under the redirect’s destination.
2. A small deferred script (about 700 bytes compressed) sends a beacon to a REST endpoint when a link is activated, including middle-click and keyboard activation.
3. The endpoint resolves the token and increments the hourly counter.

Because the token lives in the rendered HTML, the plugin keeps working behind WP Rocket, WP Super Cache, Cloudflare APO and similar full-page caches. Cached page views cost zero database queries; only the click itself reaches PHP.

Reporting

• Report screen with date presets or a custom range, host filter, search by post title or destination, summary cards and CSV export.
• Labels screen to give any destination URL a friendly name.
• Dashboard widget with the top links for today, yesterday, 7, 30 or 90 days.
• Status screen showing schema, cron and rate-limiter health.

Operations

• Bounded retention: hourly rows older than the configured window (default 24 months) are pruned daily.
• Layered abuse protection: the endpoint is POST-only and token-validated, an optional built-in per-IP limiter runs on your persistent object cache, and the documentation recommends a CDN or WAF rate-limiting rule.
• Uninstall keeps your data unless you opt in to deletion.
• Two filters let you grant report and label access to editors or authors.

Compared with redirect-based link plugins

Redirect or “cloaking” plugins route every click through your server and typically store one row per click. This plugin keeps links as real hrefs, records aggregates only, and adds no PHP work to cached page views.