Track & Display Popular Posts in WordPress with  WP_Query

All code samples have been moved to a GitHub Gist.

Most Popular Content WordPressTracking popular posts in WordPress often involves the use of a plugin. Many of the popular posts plugins out there come with tons of configurable options that you don’t need.

If you’re interested in a simple, bare bones method for tracking the popularity of a page, post or post type then perhaps this handy function will help you out.

This is_singular() and is_user_logged_in() functions allow us to only run the process on individual posts, pages or post types when the visitor is not logged into WordPress.

PHP sessions track only one view per visitor per post. If all the conditions are met the post count is stored in a hidden custom field: _base_popular_posts_count. If the field doesn’t exist we start with 1, if it does we add 1 onto the existing value.

To verify that the view count is being tracked you can add show_count=1 to your URL on any individual post to view details about the number of views for a post.

Once we have the view count stored we can display popular posts in our theme using a custom WP_Query loop.

The meta_key argument will find all posts that have the _base_popular_posts_count custom field set. We can show the posts in order of popularity by setting the orderby parameter to meta_value_num.

For higher volume websites we can display popular posts for a specific time range using some of the WP_Query date and time parameters.

By using the results of the PHP getdate() function as year, monthnum and day parameters in our WP_Query we can show posts from the current day.

Similar to the example above, we can display the most popular posts this week using the PHP date() function with the w parameter.

Similar to the example above, we can display the most popular posts this month using the PHP date() function with the monthnum parameter.

Hopefully you have a better understanding of how to track and display popular posts in WordPress without a plugin. As always, let me know if you have any questions!

Meet the Author

Kevin Leary, WordPress Consultant

I'm a freelance web developer and WordPress consultant in Boston, MA with 17 years of experience building websites and applications. View a portfolio of my work or request an estimate for your next project.