AWStatium – Page Views from AWStats

Page views, downloads and traffic statistics for WordPress from your server's AWStats data. No tracking scripts, no cookies.

Most hosting control panels (cPanel, DirectAdmin) already run AWStats, which builds statistics from the web server's access logs. AWStatium reads that data and brings it into WordPress.

• View counts per post and page: automatically below posts, with a shortcode or from your theme
• Download counts for PDFs and other files
• Statistics page (Tools → AWStatium): visits, unique visitors, page views, hits and bandwidth by month and by day, most viewed pages, downloads
• Dashboard widget: this month compared to the last one, most viewed pages
• Sortable "Views" column in the posts and pages lists
• Previous URLs: moved or renamed a page? Add its old addresses and their views are counted too. Old post slugs are added automatically.

Nothing is added to your pages for counting: no JavaScript, no cookies, no database writes on page views, no requests to other services.

Requirements

• WordPress 6.0+, PHP 7.4+
• AWStats data on the same server, readable by PHP. Typical for cPanel (~/tmp/awstats/ssl, ~/tmp/awstats) and DirectAdmin; AWStatium finds these automatically.
• Pretty permalinks
• A single site: WordPress Multisite is not supported yet, the plugin refuses to activate on a network

It does not work on hosts without AWStats or where PHP cannot read its data, which includes most managed WordPress hosting.

How URLs are matched

• A page is an address that ends with a slash, has no file extension, or ends with .html/.htm. This covers the usual permalink structures; other extensions (e.g. .php) are treated as files.
• /about and /about/ count as the same page. Paths are case-sensitive, as recorded by AWStats.
• Percent-encoding is normalised (RFC 3986, 6.2.2): letters, digits and UTF-8 characters are compared decoded, reserved characters such as %2F, %3F or %25 stay encoded, so they keep their meaning. The normalised form is stable, so stored keys can be normalised again without change.
• Query strings are ignored. AWStats leaves them out by default (URLWithQuery=0) and AWStatium drops them even when AWStats keeps them, so plain ?p=123 permalinks are not supported.
• Paths in shortcodes and "Previous URLs" are relative to the domain root, e.g. /blog/about/ when WordPress runs in /blog.
• When WordPress files live in their own directory (e.g. /wordpress with the site at /), views of /wordpress/about/ are added to /about/.

Installation

1. Download the ZIP from Releases and upload it in Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin.
2. Activate. Settings → AWStatium shows what was detected; pick another directory there if needed.
3. Choose where to show view counts, or use the shortcodes.

Shortcodes

PHP

awstatium_get_views( $post = null );      // int, current post by default
awstatium_get_path_views( $paths );       // int, path or array of paths
awstatium_get_prefix_views( $prefix );    // int, all pages below a path
awstatium_get_downloads( $match );        // int
awstatium_format_views( $count );         // "1,234 views", translated

Example for a theme that builds its own post meta line:

if ( function_exists( 'awstatium_get_views' ) && ( $n = awstatium_get_views() ) > 0 ) {
    echo '<span class="views">' . esc_html( awstatium_format_views( $n ) ) . '</span>';
}

Other cache plugins can hook into awstatium_purge_cache, which fires when the counts change.

How it works

AWStats usually updates its data once a day. AWStatium checks for new data every hour, parses only the files that changed, stores the monthly numbers in the database and purges the page cache when counts change. Visitors only read the stored numbers; AWStats files are never parsed during a page view.

• A broken or half-written AWStats file never replaces good data: the previous numbers for that month are kept and the problem is logged.
• A new data source (directory or config) is read and checked before it is accepted; a typo keeps the previous settings and numbers.
• Each source has its own stored snapshot. A new source becomes active only after its data and totals are saved, so a failed switch keeps showing the previous numbers and is retried.
• Refreshes and changes of the data source are serialised with a database lock, so two sources are never mixed.
• The sortable "Views" column is updated in batches in the background and resumes after an interruption.

Privacy

AWStatium stores only aggregated numbers per URL and per file name. It does not read the AWStats visitor list (IP addresses), sets no cookies and adds nothing to your pages for counting.

Updates

The plugin header contains Update URI: https://github.com/nuit-dev/awstatium, so WordPress never offers an unrelated plugin with the same slug from WordPress.org as an update. New versions are installed manually from Releases.

Translations

English and Croatian are included. The template is in languages/awstatium.pot.

License

Copyright (C) 2026 NUIT d.o.o.

AWStatium is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. It is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; see LICENSE for details.

AWStatium is an independent project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the AWStats project. AWStats is a separate open-source project.