Milner Stats

Lightweight post view tracking with day, week, month, year, and multi-year breakdowns. No external services. No bloat.

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Metadata

• Contributors: Jeff Milner
• Tags: stats, analytics, post views, popular posts, trending
• Requires at least: 5.8
• Tested up to: 7.0
• Stable tag: 1.1.5
• Requires PHP: 7.4
• License: GPLv2 or later

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Description

Milner Stats gives you simple view tracking for your posts and pages.

Key Features:

• View tracking — Counts page views for all post types using a non-blocking JS beacon.
• Time-period breakdowns — Day, week, month, and year views for every post.
• Trending posts — Identifies posts with unusual traffic spikes vs. their 30-day average.
• Admin dashboard — Full stats page with an interactive Chart.js activity graph and sortable top-posts table.
• Dashboard widget — A quick stats summary on the WordPress dashboard home.
• Admin bar — View count for the current post shown in the top toolbar.
• Post list columns — View counts in the Posts and Pages admin list tables (sortable!).
• Editor meta box — Per-post stats panel with a 14-day sparkline in the block editor.
• Sidebar widget — Display Popular Posts in any widget area with full customization.
• Shortcodes — [wms_views] and [wms_top_posts] for use anywhere in content.
• Template tags — wms_get_views(), wms_the_views(), wms_has_views() for theme developers.
• CSV export — Download your stats as spreadsheets (top posts, daily totals, raw data).
• Settings page — Configure tracked post types, deduplication window, and admin exclusion.
• Caching plugin compatible — Works with WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, LiteSpeed Cache.
• Privacy-friendly — IP addresses are one-way hashed, never stored in plain text.
• Bot detection — Automatically skips crawlers and search engine bots.
• No external services — All data stays in your WordPress database.
• Automatic cleanup — Daily cron job removes records older than 366 days to keep the DB lean.

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Usage

Shortcode examples:

[wms_views]                                   — Views for the current post (all-time)
[wms_views period="week"]                     — Views in the last 7 days
[wms_views id="42" label="Views: "]           — Views for post ID 42 with a label
[wms_top_posts]                               — Top 5 posts this week
[wms_top_posts period="month" limit="10" show_count="true"]

Template tag examples:

<?php wms_the_views(); ?>                         // Echo all-time views
<?php echo wms_get_views( null, 'week' ); ?>      // Get this week's views as integer
<?php if ( wms_has_views() ) { ... }  ?>          // Conditional: post has been viewed

Available REST endpoints (Admin only):

Method	Endpoint	Description
GET	/wp-json/milner-stats/v1/stats	Summary counts
GET	/wp-json/milner-stats/v1/stats/posts	Top posts by period
GET	/wp-json/milner-stats/v1/stats/chart	Time-series chart data
GET	/wp-json/milner-stats/v1/stats/post/{id}	Per-post counts + chart
GET	/wp-json/milner-stats/v1/stats/trending	Trending posts
POST	/wp-json/milner-stats/v1/track	Record a view (public)
POST	/wp-json/milner-stats/v1/cache/flush	Flush stats cache

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Installation

1. Upload the milner-stats folder to /wp-content/plugins/ — or install directly via Plugins > Add New > Upload Plugin.
2. Activate the plugin through the Plugins menu in WordPress.
3. Navigate to Milner Stats in your admin sidebar.

The plugin creates {prefix}_wms_post_views, {prefix}_wms_referrers, and {prefix}_wms_outlinks tables on activation. No additional configuration is required.

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FAQ

Does this work with caching plugins? Yes. The tracker uses JavaScript fetch() / sendBeacon(), which fires after the page loads from cache.

Will it slow down my site? No. The frontend tracker script is tiny (~1 KB) and fires via requestIdleCallback. It has zero impact on page load time or Core Web Vitals.

Does it track logged-in admins? By default, views from users with edit_posts capability are excluded. This is configurable in Settings.

Does it store IP addresses? No. IP addresses are processed through a one-way SHA-256 hash with a site-specific salt.

What does "Trending" mean? A post is trending when its views in the last 24 hours are $\ge 2.0$x its daily average over the past 30 days (minimum 3 views today).

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Changelog

1.1.5

• Diagnostics: added pulldown to show 10, 25, or 50 most recent Internal Referrer Records (default 10).
• Added Trending Now sidebar widget showing posts with unusual 24-hour traffic spikes.

1.1.4

• Bug fixes.

1.1.3

• Import from Jetpack.

1.1.2

• Fixed a bug that meant Milner Stats only kept stats for 1 year.

1.1.1

• Bar graph instead of line graph.

1.0.0

• Initial release.