Show Popular Posts Without Plugins: This one is a little trickier. However, if you are not too keen on installing an extra plugin to showcase popular posts (say, you have limited server memory or disk space), follow this snippet. Remember lots of plugins is not always a good thing. They don’t always play nice and can crash your site.

Paste the following in functions.php:


function count_post_visits() {
    if( is_single() ) {
        global $post;
        $views = get_post_meta( $post->ID, 'my_post_viewed', true );
        if( $views == '' ) {
            update_post_meta( $post->ID, 'my_post_viewed', '1' );   
        } else {
            $views_no = intval( $views );
            update_post_meta( $post->ID, 'my_post_viewed', ++$views_no );
        }
    }
}
add_action( 'wp_head', 'count_post_visits' );

 

Thereafter, paste the following wherever in the template files that you wish to display the popular posts:


$popular_posts_args = array(
 'posts_per_page' => 3,
 'meta_key' => 'my_post_viewed',
 'orderby' => 'meta_value_num',
 'order'=> 'DESC'
);
 
$popular_posts_loop = new WP_Query( $popular_posts_args );
 
while( $popular_posts_loop->have_posts() ):
 $popular_posts_loop->the_post();
 // Loop continues
endwhile;
wp_reset_query();

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