The Hits List

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, with hourly precision for recent activity
• Import and export your view counts as CSV or JSON
• Trending posts ranked by smoothed changes in recorded daily rates, with history coverage labels
• Refresh candidates highlighting well-read posts that have gone quiet
• Snooze refresh candidates for 30 days, undo a snooze, and record an intentional refresh with seven-day before/after reports
• 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
• Optional current-post exclusion across blocks, widgets, shortcodes, and template tags
• Optional publication-age limit across blocks, widgets, shortcodes, and template tags
• Automatic count cleanup after permanent content deletion; trash retains view history by default
• Resumable background cleanup of old orphaned count rows, with a visible removal report
• WP-CLI count removal for selected posts, with previews and multisite targeting
• WordPress dashboard cards for daily top posts, all-time top posts, and views over time
• Additional-role dashboard access controls, with existing capability filters taking precedence
• Sortable view columns for Posts, Pages, and selected public custom post types, with batched count reads
• Editor metabox controls for post counts, per-post exclusions, display suppression, and manual thumbnail URLs
• Article performance in the editor, with lifetime views, 7-/30-day charts, accessible daily tables, and history-aware comparisons
• Post, category, and tag suppression across public lists and dashboard rankings without losing view counts
• 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, hits_list_daily, and hits_list_hourly 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 and hourly buckets for 48 hours by default. Older rows are removed automatically. Permanent content deletion removes its stored counts; moving content to Trash keeps its history by default.

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:

1. Go to blocks/popular-posts/.
2. Run npm install.
3. 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.