WebberZone Top 10 — Popular Posts (original) (raw)
WordPress lacks built-in page view tracking or a popular posts feature. Top 10 solves this by counting views across posts, pages, and custom post types, then letting you showcase your most popular content.
Top 10 provides blocks, widgets, shortcodes, and template functions for displaying popular posts and view counts across your site. All tracking data is stored locally in your WordPress database, with no external services involved.
Top 10 includes comprehensive features such as thumbnail support, flexible display options, custom post type support, and developer-friendly extensibility. A built-in caching layer reduces server load, while AJAX-based tracking avoids page cache interference and works with most popular caching plugins.
Top 10 also exposes a powerful API with WordPress actions and filters, allowing developers to customise queries, tracking behaviour, and output rendering without modifying core plugin files.
Features
- Page Counter: Tracks hourly post views on posts, pages, and custom post types. Display counts automatically using blocks, shortcodes, or template functions
- Popular Posts: Display most viewed posts by total counts or within custom time periods
- Gutenberg Support: Dedicated “Popular Posts [Top 10]” block with configurable display options
- Multisite Dashboard: Network-wide aggregated statistics across all sites in a multisite installation
- Widgets: Sidebar widgets for daily and overall popular posts with extensive customisation
- Shortcodes: Use
[tptn_list]to display popular post lists and[tptn_views]to show view counts - Thumbnails:
- WordPress post thumbnail support with custom
tptn_thumbnailimage size - Automatic extraction of the first image from post content
- Manual thumbnail URLs via Edit Post screens
- WordPress post thumbnail support with custom
- Exclusions: Exclude posts by category or post ID from popular post lists
- Styling: Output wrapped in semantic CSS classes. Add custom CSS via settings or use included styles
- Admin Interface: View daily and overall popular posts from the dashboard. Adds sortable view-count columns to post and page lists
- Export/Import: Export count tables and settings, and restore them on the same site or other installs
- Caching Compatibility: Works with WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, Quick Cache, and similar plugins
- Developer-Friendly: Extensive filters and actions to customise queries, tracking behaviour, and output rendering
Features in Top 10 Pro
- Enhanced Tracking and Performance
- Fast and High-Traffic Trackers: Alternative tracking methods for improved performance on busy sites
- Query Optimisation: MySQL
MAX_EXECUTION_TIMEdirective to prevent long-running queries, configurable via settings and thetop_ten_query_max_execution_timefilter - Data Retention Override: Customizable data retention period (default 180 days via
TOP_TEN_STORE_DATA)
- Advanced Blocks and Widgets
- Top 10 Query Block: Query and display popular posts directly from the block or site editor
- Enhanced Top 10 Featured Image Block: Support for multiple image sources with fallbacks
- Popular Posts Block Enhancements:
- Save and clear default block settings with a single click
- Auto-insert default and global settings attributes with an option to disable
- Enhanced Admin Tools
- Admin Bar Integration: Admin bar menu item to view daily, total, and overall post counts, access admin pages, and clear cache
- Disable Admin Bar menu: Setting to disable the Admin Bar menu
- Dashboard Access Control: Setting to control which user roles can view the Top 10 dashboard
- Display Settings: Setting to choose which post type screens display admin columns
- Mini “Top 10 Views Overview” widget: Compact views-over-time chart on the WordPress Dashboard
- Multisite Settings Copy: Tool to copy settings between sites in a multisite network
- Custom Display Options
- Taxonomy-Specific Displays:
display_only_on_tax_idsparameter to restrict popular post displays to specific taxonomy terms - Category Inclusion: Edit Post meta box option to include popular posts from specific categories
- RSS Feed Filtering: Filter RSS feeds by category or post type via settings or URL parameters
- Taxonomy-Specific Displays:
- Developer-Friendly Features
- Custom Post Type Sortable Columns: Admin columns on supported custom post types with sortable functionality
GDPR
Top 10 does not collect personal visitor data out of the box. Tracking data is stored locally in the wp_top_ten and wp_top_ten_daily database tables (table prefix may vary).
You are responsible for ensuring GDPR compliance on your website.
Translations
Top 10 is available for translation on WordPress.org.
See the Translator Handbook to contribute.
Contribute
Top 10 is developed openly on GitHub.
Fork the project and submit pull requests for bug fixes or improvements. Please do not use GitHub for support requests.
Other WebberZone Plugins
- Contextual Related Posts – Display related posts on your WordPress site and feeds
- Better Search – Enhance WordPress search with relevance-based results
- Knowledge Base – Create a knowledge base or FAQ section
- WebberZone Snippetz – Manage custom HTML, CSS, and JavaScript snippets
- Auto-Close – Automatically close comments, pingbacks, and trackbacks
- Popular Authors – Display popular authors widgets. Addon for Top 10.
- Followed Posts – Show related posts based on reader journeys
This plugin provides 2 blocks.
- Top 10 Popular Posts Display the Popular Posts
- Top 10 Post Count Display the number of visits for a post.
WordPress install (easy way)
- Go to Plugins Add New in your WordPress Admin
- Search for “Top 10”
- Click Install Now and then Activate
Manual install
- Download the
top-10.zipfile - Go to Plugins Add New Upload Plugin
- Upload the ZIP file and click Install Now
- Activate the plugin
- Configure settings under Top 10 Settings
Help and Support
Where can I get help and support?
Before opening a support request, please check the following resources:
These cover the most common questions and are the fastest way to get answers, as they are actively maintained.
If your question is not answered there, please create a new topic in the
WordPress.org support forum.
This is the preferred support channel for the free plugin, and the forums are monitored regularly.
Support for products sold and distributed by WebberZone is available only
to users with an active, valid licence. Licensed users can request support here.
Can this plugin replace Google Analytics?
No. Top 10 tracks page views and displays popular posts. It is not designed to replace analytics platforms.
How does scheduled maintenance work?
When enabled, Top 10 runs a scheduled task that periodically removes old entries
from the wp_top_ten_daily table.
Note: WordPress executes scheduled tasks on the first eligible page load.
How can I report security bugs?
You can report security bugs through the Patchstack Vulnerability Disclosure Program.
The Patchstack team help validate, triage and handle any security vulnerabilities.
Report a security vulnerability.
Was using WordPress Popular Posts to see pages getting visits on my website until it stopped working. Had to look for alternatives and found this. Installed it but it still didn’t work. I had to remove it and lo and behold, an email from the developer! Couldn’t believe it because I haven’t seen that before. To cut a long story short, he helped me to resolve the problem and the plugin works like a charm! I definitely recommend. 5 stars.
large different views count, at Top 10 just 5 views, on jetpack 120 views at Top 10 7K views, on jetpack 10K views tell me why?
Since the widgets in my Soledad theme (pencidesign) don’t allow you to choose post types (well, they do, but as always, it doesn’t work), I installed the Popular Post plugin. The plugin works perfectly and looks good, but it says it’s out of date and needs changing. So I installed this plugin, with lots of useless options and inconsistent settings between the widget and the admin configuration. But the display is ugly, the photos don’t adapt automatically and perfectly, like Popular Post, and like the old plugins, before the arrival of tablet and mobile, it asks you to set sizes for the photos. But what size to set? There’s no option for desktop, tablet or mobile! Good programmers have images that adapt to the device! I thought I’d have to buy the pro version for the display to be correct, but after registering on the site, there’s nothing. So it’s a shame to see Wordpress going downhill, evolving in the wrong direction and good plugins disappearing.
I was forced to replace WordPress Popular Posts (plugin is banned from Kinsta Hosting) and was happy to find Top-10. Does a nice job, but not yet as versatile as WPP. Already has a lot of extension points (hooks), which i’ll further investigate (e.g. showing category names after title/excerpt). Developer seems responsive and very supportive, which is nice!
Use this plugin since 2018 for all my sites, easy to install and configure. Just one time issue with my new site, but it’s solved. Nice plugin, awesome features and plus great support! Big Thank You!
Using WordPress, I created a reusable block and add the most popular posts over the last 24 hours to the end of every news story (it’s a news site). Since adding that feature, my page views and time on site have nearly doubled, it helps to present my readers with other posts that are relevant at the time. Even if someone finds a news article that is a few years old through a web search, at the end of the article it will display the most current trending stories to encourage people to keep reading. Works great. I recommend.
“WebberZone Top 10 — Popular Posts” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
4.2.0
Release post: https://webberzone.com/announcements/top-10-v4-2-0/
- New:
- Settings wizard to guide initial configuration and review existing settings
- Network-wide dashboard with aggregated multisite statistics
- [Pro] High-traffic tracking mode with status validation panel
- [Pro] Copy settings between multisite network sites
- [Pro] Compact “Top 10 Views Overview” dashboard widget
- [Pro] Option to disable the Admin Bar menu
- [Pro] Maintenance setting to override data retention period
- Improvements:
- [Pro] Improved dashboard chart bar click-through to open the Popular Posts screen filtered to that day
- Updated Settings API to version 2.7.1
- Improved media handler with recursion protection and more robust processing
- Media Handler now supports the FIFU WordPress plugin for featured image detection.
- Improved Tools page statistics display and caching
- Wrapped Import/Export and Tools sections in postbox containers for consistent UI
- Developer / Internal:
- Refactored popular posts queries for improved performance and WordPress VIP compatibility
- Updated caching behaviour for dynamic exclusions
- Refactored database operations into a dedicated Database class
- Updated Freemius SDK to version 2.13.0
- Fixes:
- Fixed
Top_Ten_Queryhandling of thedate_queryargument - Fixed activation redirects on single-site installs within multisite networks
- Fixed
exclude_current_postbehaviour when caching is enabled - Fixed live-edit count updates in multisite statistics
- Fixed