WPCreatix ViewMeter – WordPress Visitor Counter

Yes, without configuration. Counting happens in the browser and posts to your site, so a cached page counts correctly. The tracker is explicitly excluded from the combining, minification and script-delay features of the common optimisers, because that is what usually breaks a counter. The health check confirms the endpoint answers.

Usually because ViewMeter refuses traffic other tools count: crawlers, AI scrapers, headless browsers, prefetches and your own signed-in team. The Quality screen shows exactly what was refused and why, so you can check rather than guess.

Not in any way you will notice. The counting script is small (about 6 KB compressed). A view is written to a file, not to the database, and a job turns the file into rows once a minute. On a very busy site you can turn on the fast endpoint in Settings → Advanced, which records a view without loading WordPress.

Counting you sets none. Repeat visitors are recognised by a salted hash that is re-keyed daily. A first-party cookie mode is available in Settings → Privacy if you need true unique counts across days; it usually needs consent.

Two other cookies are written only when a visitor presses something: viewmeter_consent , which remembers their answer to the consent banner if you switch that on, and viewmeter_optout , which remembers that they asked never to be counted. Each holds one word and no identifier of any kind. The opt-out one is relied on as strictly necessary rather than consented to, because it exists only to carry out the request the visitor made — which is also why it keeps working for someone who refused consent.

ViewMeter is built to store nothing that identifies an anonymous visitor, and the Privacy Audit screen reads your live settings and tables so you can check that for your install rather than take it on trust. A privacy-policy section is supplied for your policy page, written from your live settings rather than from the defaults, and it links your readers to a page where they can withdraw consent or exclude themselves for good. WordPress’s own export and erase requests are answered as well. Compliance depends on your whole site, so this is not legal advice.

Yes: Post Views Counter, WP Statistics, Burst Statistics, Koko Analytics, Independent Analytics, WordPress Popular Posts, SlimStat Analytics, Page Views Count, a post meta field, and CSV exports from Jetpack Stats and Plausible. The import never writes to the other plugin’s tables, so you can evaluate it and go back.

Two blocks: View count and Most viewed. Shortcodes: [viewmeter] , [viewmeter_most_viewed] and [viewmeter_site_views] , plus [viewmeter_product_views] on WooCommerce sites. A classic widget, and an Elementor widget when Elementor is active. Four template tags: viewmeter_get_views() , viewmeter_the_views() , viewmeter_get_most_viewed() , viewmeter_get_site_views() . Automatic display above or below the content, with a threshold, so a post with three views shows no count at all. Your own markup for a count — [viewmeter template="{views} views since {date}"] — instead of only a label and a position. See “Can I change how the count looks?” below. 'orderby' => 'views' in any WP_Query , and so in the Query Loop block. Totals are also copied to post meta (on by default, Settings → Data), so page builders that can only sort by a custom field can sort by views too.

From a header your CDN already sets — Cloudflare, CloudFront, App Engine, Fastly and the common GeoIP modules are all read — or from a local database file. No database is bundled in the download, and no lookup service is ever called, so a visitor’s address is never sent anywhere: the file sits on your own server and is read there. You can upload one yourself, run wp viewmeter geo install , or switch on the automatic DB-IP download. With no source available, Places says so rather than showing zeros.

Yes. Scheduled email reports go to the people you choose, and traffic alerts tell you when something changes.

ViewMeter also tells you when a page passes a round number of views, when the whole site does, and when it sets a new busiest day or busiest month. Each milestone is sent once, ever. The first check writes down the records your site already holds and sends nothing, so switching the feature on does not mail you years of history. Milestones report views only, never visitor counts.

Analytics can fail without any sign, because no traffic and broken counting look the same on a chart. Eight checks run: the buffer folder is writable, the aggregator has drained recently, WP-Cron is alive, every table exists, the collection endpoint answers, counting without JavaScript is working if you turned it on, geolocation is resolving, and whether a persistent object cache is in use. A failing check names the thing, the condition and the fix. wp viewmeter health exits non-zero when one fails, so it can drive a monitor across a fleet.

ViewMeter never changes a setting on its own. If a firewall is challenging the loopback probe, it says the probe could not decide rather than claiming counting is broken.

Yes. A crawler list compiled into the plugin covers search engines and AI scrapers including GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot, PerplexityBot and Bytespider. Headless browsers and automation drivers — HeadlessChrome, Puppeteer, Playwright, Selenium — are refused too. So are browser prefetch and prerender, so a page nobody looked at is not a view, and feeds, previews, your own team by role, and IP addresses, ranges or wildcards you list.

Sixteen reasons in total. The Quality screen lists every reason that refused something in the dates you picked, with how many hits it refused, its share of all hits, and one line saying what it means.

WooCommerce, counting products the way posts are counted and sorting the products list by views. WPML and Polylang, with translations sharing one count or keeping their own. AMP, through amp-pixel , because AMP forbids the normal beacon.

Caching and optimisation: WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache, WP Fastest Cache, WP-Optimize, Autoptimize, Hummingbird, W3 Total Cache, Breeze, Cache Enabler and Perfmatters. Each is opted out through its own documented mechanism, because an optimiser folding the tracker into a combined bundle, or deferring it past the point the visitor has gone, is a common reason a counter reads zero.

Sort-by-views in the query loops of Elementor Pro, Divi, Beaver Builder, GenerateBlocks and Kadence Blocks. Form plugins, which record that a form was submitted and never what was in it.

Yes. Choose which types to count in Settings → Tracking. Anything switched off is named on the Quality screen, so a post type cannot read zero without you being told why.

Yes. Reading the reports and changing the settings are two separate capabilities, mapped per role. An administrator always holds both.

Yes. Set a lifetime figure exactly in Quick Edit, or reset counts in Bulk Edit.

It depends on your traffic. ViewMeter keeps its data in two layers.

The aggregate layer is kept forever: per-page per-day counters, running lifetime totals, a per-day rollup for each dimension, and the tally of what was refused. These are what the reports read, and they grow with your page count, not your traffic.

The raw layer — one row per hit, one per session, one per visitor hash — grows with traffic and is kept for the retention window, 365 days by default. Pruning removes only those rows; lifetime totals and per-day history do not move. What you lose is cross-tabs: “visitors from Germany, by day, for three years” answers forever; “visitors from Germany reading this post” only answers inside the window. Set the window to 0 and nothing is ever pruned.

There are eighteen tables, most of them small lookup tables. If you choose to archive old visit detail instead of deleting it, three more are added to hold it. The Debugger screen shows the size on disk and the row count for every table.

Export as CSV, TSV, Excel, XML or NDJSON, streamed, so five years costs the same memory as a week.

You can also download a report as a PDF, or open a printable version and save it as a PDF from your browser’s Print dialog. The PDF can only draw Western European letters; for other alphabets it tells you, and you can use the printable version instead.

Instead of deleting raw visit detail at the retention window, you can archive it: the same rows move into sibling tables the reports never read, so the live tables stay small and the detail is still there. Archived rows can be put back, and putting them back changes no reported figure. Worth knowing for a privacy policy: archived rows are kept, not deleted, so visitor hashes archived this way outlive the retention window until you delete the archive.

Both are off when you install ViewMeter, and neither exposes anything until you switch it on.

The public stats page opens one address that shows your traffic to anyone who has the link, with no WordPress login. You choose how much it shows: totals and trend only, plus your most-read pages, or plus where the traffic came from. The page carries no login link, no form and no JavaScript, and search engines are asked not to index it. Only content a visitor could already open appears on it: drafts, private and password-gated posts, and posts of non-public post types are left out, and so are author