The Hits List focuses on one job: track WordPress post views locally and make popular content easy to display.
Local View Tracking
View counts are stored in your WordPress database instead of a third-party analytics service. The plugin keeps overall counts and daily counts so you can display all-time or recent popularity.
Popular Posts Block, Widget, And Shortcodes
Use the Popular Posts block in the block editor, the Popular Posts widget in widget areas, or the [thl_list] shortcode in post content. These surfaces are useful for sidebars, homepage modules, section fronts, and other places where readers should see what is getting attention.
As of version 1.4.0 the block and widget offer the same options. Both can filter by category or post ID, render as a list or a grid, show list markers, and order by views or by trending.
Trending And Refresh Candidates
A list of your most-viewed posts is usually dominated by the same evergreen content, and it does not tell you what is happening right now.
Trending ranks posts by how quickly views are rising compared with each post's own recent history, so a post climbing from a modest base can outrank a long-standing favourite. It is available in the block, the widget, shortcodes, theme helpers, and a dashboard card.
Refresh candidates is the reverse view: posts that once did well and have quietly fallen away. These are the pieces most likely to be worth an update, and they are easy to miss because they never appear on a most-viewed list.
Both are calculated from view data the plugin already collects. Nothing extra is tracked.
Dashboard Cards
The WordPress dashboard includes five cards:
- Daily top posts.
- All-time top posts.
- Views over time, with a comparison against the previous period.
- Trending now.
- Refresh candidates.
These cards give editors a quick pulse check without leaving wp-admin.
Post List View Columns
Post list screens can show view-count columns for quick editorial review. Use them to spot strong performers, confirm migrated counts, or compare daily activity against all-time totals.
Data Retention And Export
Daily view data is kept for 180 days by default, and that window is configurable from the settings screen. All-time counts are never removed.
You can download your view counts as CSV or JSON at any time. The data is stored on your own site, so export exists to let you take it elsewhere rather than to retrieve it from a service.
Top 10 Migration
The Hits List can import compatible overall and daily counts from Top 10 tables. Imports are rerun-safe, so repeating an unchanged import does not double-count the same source data. Existing Top 10 widgets and shortcodes keep working after Top 10 is deactivated, and the plugin can clean up leftover Top 10 data when you are ready.
See Migrating From Top 10 before running a production migration.
REST Tracking With AJAX Fallback
The plugin uses REST-based tracking with an AJAX fallback for environments where REST requests are blocked or altered.
Built To Stay Quick
Popular-post output is cached and its database work is batched, so a list costs roughly the same whether it shows three posts or thirty. On sites with a persistent object cache the savings carry between page loads as well.
Privacy-Friendly Operation
The Hits List keeps tracking data local to your WordPress database and does not send view counts to a third-party analytics endpoint.