I would like to share with you one WordPress extension that is quite popular with both site owners and visitors. This is a Popular Posts extension that is available for free in the WordPress repository.
This extension collects reading statistics of individual articles and, bas on simple algorithms, determines which articles are popular among users (in the select period – for example, the last week) and displays them, for example, in the sidebar of your site or at the end of the article. The idea is to keep the visitor on the site as long as possible by getting them interest in an article that has interest the majority of other visitors. Simply put, it’s kind of like “trending” posts on social mia.
Plugin installation
We download the extension from the WordPress repository and activate it.
Settings and other options
The plugin is so simple that there is no ne to set it up. It automatically counts the reading of posts, you don’t have to worry about anything. However, it still contains a few options that can be set. I will briefly explain them to you.
Click through the left menu in the administration, section Settings -> WordPress Popular Posts and click Tools at the top of the page (in the middle ) .
This subpage contains three sections. The first of them refers to the Thumbnails setting , i.e. thumbnail images that are us when listing popular posts.
You can choose a default image (Default thumbnail), which will be us if the article does not have a preview photo. With the second option (Pick image from), you can set where the preview image should be load from (you can choose, for example, the first photo from the article). However, I would leave this setting unchang, just as I recommend leaving the use of the Lazy load function on, to spe up page loading.
The second Data section contains more options, mainly relat to the type of traffic data storage. I would recommend leaving the “Log views from” option to “Everyone” so that information about article traffic is collect from all users, both logg in and not logg in.
If you have a more visit page, you can use russia phone number data the “Log limit” option, thanks to which you can set how long the collect reading statistics should be stor. This can save your database capacity.
Sure to leave the Ajaxify widget
option turn on, especially if you use an extension for caching page content . I also recommend the final steps we are taking to prepare for christmas sales leaving the other options in the default settings to optimize the performance of the plugin and your site.
In the third Miscellaneous section , we can only set whether the links from this plugin should be load in a new window or in the bw lists same one (I recommend leaving “Current window”, i.e. in the same window).