The Hits List keeps post view tracking on your own WordPress site and gives you block, widget, and template-tag tools for displaying popular content.
Key features:
- Local view tracking stored in WordPress database tables
- Trending posts ranked by how fast views are rising, not just totals
- Refresh candidates highlighting well-read posts that have gone quiet
- CSV and JSON export of your view counts
- Overall and daily popular-post counts
- Popular Posts block and widget support with public post type selection
- WordPress dashboard cards for daily top posts, all-time top posts, and views over time
- Editor metabox controls for post counts, per-post exclusions, display suppression, and manual thumbnail URLs
- Top 10 migration compatibility with resumable rerun-safe imports, WP-CLI tools, legacy widget support, native widget conversion, cleanup for old Top 10 leftovers, and optional Top 10 plugin removal
- REST-based tracking with AJAX fallback
- Privacy-policy integration for site owners
Privacy
The Hits List stores post view counts locally in the hits_list and hits_list_daily database tables (table prefix may vary).
It does not send tracking data to a third-party analytics service.
Daily tracking buckets are retained for 180 days by default and older rows are removed automatically.
You are responsible for describing your use of visitor analytics on your own site as needed.
Source Code and Build Tools
The compiled block assets in blocks/popular-posts/build/ are generated from the human-readable source files included in blocks/popular-posts/src/.
To rebuild the block assets:
- Go to
blocks/popular-posts/. - Run
npm install. - Run
npm run build.
The block build uses @wordpress/scripts. Runtime PHP, vanilla JavaScript, and CSS assets outside the block build are maintained directly in the plugin source.