Track Views, Surface Popular Content, and Move Off Top 10.
The Hits List 1.4.0 keeps post view tracking on your own WordPress site. It gives editors and site owners a practical way to display popular content through a block, a widget, dashboard cards, post-list columns, and theme helpers — without sending view data to someone else’s analytics endpoint.
Current release: 1.4.0. Need setup details or technical documentation?
Core Features That Make the List
The Hits List covers the popular-content basics that most sites actually need, and keeps the data behind them on your own server.
| Feature | What It Does for You |
| Local View Tracking | Stores overall and daily view counts in your own WordPress database. |
| Popular Posts Block | Adds popular-content lists to block editor layouts, with public post type selection. |
| Popular Posts Widget | Places popular content in sidebars, footers, and any widget-ready theme area. |
| Dashboard Cards | Shows daily top posts, all-time top posts, and views over time inside wp-admin. |
| Post List Columns | Puts view counts where editors already review content. |
| Editor Controls | Adjust counts, exclude individual posts, suppress popular lists on a post, or set a manual thumbnail. |
| Top 10 Migration | Imports compatible Top 10 counts in resumable batches, without double-counting unchanged reruns. |
| Privacy-Friendly Operation | Keeps view tracking local instead of shipping it to a third-party analytics endpoint. |
What Changed in the Latest Release?
Version 1.4.0 adds trending, which ranks posts by how fast their views are rising against their own baseline rather than by raw totals. A post that is quietly accelerating surfaces alongside the perennial favourites instead of being buried beneath them, and trending is available in the block, the widget, shortcodes, template tags, and a new dashboard card.
A companion Refresh Candidates card does the inverse. It lists established posts whose readership has fallen away, so the content worth updating is as visible as the content worth promoting.
The block and widget now have the same capabilities: the block can filter by category and post ID, and the widget can render grids and list markers. Daily data retention is configurable from the settings screen rather than filter-only, view counts export as CSV or JSON, and the views-over-time card compares each window against the one before it. New [thl_list] and [thl_views] shortcodes ship alongside [tptn_list] and [tptn_views] aliases that register only when Top 10 has not already claimed them, so a migrating site does not end up with broken shortcodes sitting in post content. Popular-post lookups are now batched instead of issuing one database query per row, behind a filterable object cache you can tune or disable with thehili_cache_ttl.
Who Can Benefit from The Hits List?
The Hits List suits sites that want popular-content tools without turning every view count into a third-party analytics workflow.
- Publishers and blogs: Surface trending or evergreen posts without bolting on an analytics suite.
- Editors: Review view-count signals directly in wp-admin, where the work already happens.
- Agencies: Replace Top 10 on client sites while keeping familiar popular-post output.
- Privacy-conscious sites: Keep view data in the WordPress database instead of a third party’s.
The Hits List Promise: Your View Data Stays Yours
View counts are stored in your WordPress database and nowhere else. There is no third-party analytics endpoint, no account to create, and no tracking script phoning home on behalf of someone you have never met.
Daily tracking buckets are kept for 180 days by default, and older rows are removed automatically, so the tables do not grow without limit on a busy site.
The Hits List is free, with no pro tier and no feature held back behind an upgrade prompt.