Top 10 – Popular posts plugin for WordPress free WordPress plugin

WordPress doesn’t have an in-built system to track page views or displaying popular posts. Top 10 is an easy to use, yet, powerful WordPress plugin that will count the number of page views of your posts, pages and any custom post types. You can then display the page view counts as well as display your most popular posts.

Top 10 adds two widgets that you can use to display a list of popular posts and the counta cross all your blog posts.

Although several similar plugins exist today, Top 10 is one of the most feature-rich popular post plugins with support for thumbnails, shortcodes, widgets, custom post types and CSS styles. The inbuilt caching system also helps reduce server load by caching your popular posts output. The tracking uses ajax and is thus compatible with most popular caching plugins.

Top 10 also has powerful API and is fully extendable with WordPress actions and filters to allow you easily extend the code base to add new features or tweak existing ones.

Features

• Page counter: Counts page views on single posts, pages and custom post types on an hourly basis which can then be easily displayed automatically, using shortcodes or functions
• Popular posts: Display a list of popular posts either for total counts or for a custom period. You can choose how many posts are to be displayed along with loads of other customisation options
• Gutenberg / Block Editor support: You can find a block called “Popular Posts [Top 10]” with its own configurable set of options
• Widget ready: Sidebar widgets available for daily popular and overall popular posts. Highly customizable widgets to control what you want to display in the list of posts
• Shortcodes: The plugin includes two shortcodes [tptn_list] and [tptn_views] to display the posts list and the number of views respectively
• Thumbnail support
  • Support for WordPress post thumbnails. Top 10 will create a custom image size (tptn_thumbnail) with the dimensions specified in the Settings page
  • Auto-extract the first image in your post to be displayed as a thumbnail
  • Manually enter the URL of the thumbnail via WordPress meta fields. Specify this using the meta box in your Edit screens.
• Exclusions: Exclude posts from select categories from appearing in the top posts list. Also exclude posts by ID from appearing in the list
• Styles: The output is wrapped in CSS classes which allows you to easily style the list. You can enter your custom CSS styles from within WordPress Admin area or use the style included.
• Admin interface: View list of daily and/or overall popular posts from within the dashboard. Top 10 also adds two sortable columns to your All Posts and All Pages pages in your WordPress Admin area
• Export/Import interface: Export the count tables and settings to restore in the same site or on other installs
• Works with caching plugins like WP-Super-Cache, W3 Total Cache or Quick Cache
• Extendable code: Top 10 has tonnes of filters and actions that allow any developer to easily add features, edit outputs, etc.

GDPR

Top 10 is GDPR compliant as it doesn’t collect any personal data about your visitors when installed out of the box. You can see the data the plugin stores in the wp_top_ten and wp_top_ten_daily tables in the database. Note: the prefix wp might be different if you have changed it from the default.

YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR ENSURING THAT ALL GDPR REQUIREMENTS ARE MET ON YOUR WEBSITE.

Donations

I spend a significant amount of my free time maintaining, updating and more importantly supporting this plugin. If you have been using this plugin and find this useful, do consider making a donation. This helps me pay for my hosting and domains.

Translations

Top 10 is available for translation directly on WordPress.org. Check out the official Translator Handbook to contribute.

Contribute

Top 10 is also available on Github
So, if you’ve got some cool feature that you’d like to implement into the plugin or a bug you’ve been able to fix, consider forking the project and sending me a pull request. Please don’t use that for support requests.