How to Add Stats to the Bottom of a WordPress Post

Want to show off the popularity of your website?

Displaying a stat counter on your posts might seem a bit old school, but it’s an excellent source of social proof.

A stat counter shows visitors know that lots of other people have read your content, and it signals to advertisers that your site could be a great source of leads.

Obviously, you don’t want to type the stats into each post yourself, so you’ll need a solution that works automatically, and for that, you’ll need a new plugin.

Add a view counter plugin

There are a couple of great view counter plugins for WordPress to choose from.

We are biased, of course, but we’d like to start off by recommending our plugin, Independent Analytics.

Since the view counter needs to record pageviews, it is essentially an analytics tool. We figure that you may as well choose a complete analytics platform that also has a view counter built-in instead of using separate tools.

Independent Analytics is free, fast, and doesn’t use cookies, making it a GDPR-friendly solution.

When it comes to adding stats to the bottom of your posts, the view counter is easy to enable. Here’s what it will look like on your posts:

If you’d like to explore another alternative, check out the Post Views Counter plugin.

If you’re already happy with your analytics and want a lightweight solution only to track pageviews for the view counter, this might be the best choice for your site.

It will add a view counter to all your posts, similar to the one in Independent Analytics.

Now that you’ve got some plugins to choose from, here are the steps to enable and customize the view counter.

How to show the view counter

In the Independent Analytics plugin, the view counter is not enabled by default. To enable it, you just have to visit the Settings menu and check a single box.

Once enabled, you can choose which post types you want to enable it on. If you want the stats to show up at the bottom of all your posts, then check the Posts box, save the settings, and you’re done.

There are a few other options available if you’d like to customize how the stats look or where they display. For instance, you can change the location to before the content, remove the icon, or change the label text.

If you’re using the Post Views Counter plugin, the steps are equally easy.

The counter is enabled automatically upon installation, and there are a lot of options to customize the display of the counter.

Now that you’ve seen how to enable a view counter at the bottom of your blog posts, you might be wondering how to display your stats elsewhere.

Let’s take a look at how you can show off your stats in the sidebar and footer too.

How to add stats to the sidebar or footer

Both of the plugins recommended here include a shortcode, which you can copy and paste anywhere you want on your site to output the stat counter.

For instance, here’s what the shortcode provided by Independent Analytics looks like:

[iawp_view_counter label="Views:" icon="1"]

In addition to outputting the stat counter, it includes options to change the label text and show/hide the icon by entering “0” or “1.”

The shortcode can be added to a Shortcode block or widget, which means it can be added virtually anywhere. As long as your theme has a widget area or blocks enabled in the sidebar and footer, you can output the stats there.

Start showing off your traffic

While they may seem outdated to some people, view counters are still a great form of social proof that will boost the confidence of both readers and advertisers.

And as a WordPress user, adding these stats to your posts is extremely easy, thanks to the free plugins available.

If you’re interested in trying our plugin, you can download it for free here:

We also give a hearty recommendation to the Post Views Counter plugin, which has long been a popular choice for adding a view counter to posts.

Thanks for reading this guide on how to add stats to the bottom of a WordPress post, and feel free to post any questions you have in the comments section below.