Post Views Counter
View on WordPress.orgScores higher than 96% of indexed plugins
About
Post Views Counter allows you to collect and display how many times a post, page, or other content has been viewed in a simple, fast and reliable way.
Security History
What It Does
Post Views Counter tracks how many times each post, page, or custom content type on your WordPress site has been viewed and stores those counts in its own database table. It gives you shortcodes, widgets, and a template tag so you can display view counts on your site or build a "popular posts" listing. Counting happens via PHP or JavaScript depending on your settings, and the data stays entirely on your own server rather than being sent to a third party.
Who It's For
This plugin is a good fit for bloggers, magazines, news sites, and course platforms that want a simple, self-hosted view counter to power "most popular" widgets or measure content engagement without setting up a full analytics suite. It works best for site owners who care about on-site display of view counts more than deep funnel analysis or conversion attribution.
Who Should Skip It
If you need full behavioural analytics, traffic sources, or goal tracking, this plugin will not replace a proper analytics tool like Site Kit, Matomo, or Google Analytics. You should also skip it if you run a very high-traffic site where every extra database write matters, since view tracking adds a row update on each request.
The Bottom Line
Post Views Counter does one job, displaying how many times each piece of content has been viewed, and it does that job very well with a 98% user rating and a near-perfect maintenance record. It is not an analytics platform, so anyone needing traffic sources, user flows, or conversion data should pair it with a real analytics tool. For bloggers and publishers who mainly want a popular-posts widget and a self-hosted view count, it is a strong, lightweight choice with an overall quality score of 85.94 out of 100.
Related Plugins
Pick Site Kit when you want the official Google Analytics, Search Console, and AdSense integration in one dashboard rather than a simple on-site view counter.
Choose Independent Analytics if you want Google Analytics-style reports and dashboards stored in your own database without sending data to Google.
Pick Matomo when you need privacy-first, full-featured analytics with funnels, heatmaps, and segmentation rather than just post-level view counts.
Choose WP Statistics if you want a privacy-friendly Google Analytics replacement with detailed visitor and page-level reports and 600,000 installs behind it.
Pick Burst Statistics if you want a lightweight, cookieless analytics alternative that is closer in spirit to this plugin but focused on site-wide metrics.