So, I’ve got a weird issue. I’m at a publication that uses WordPress as a CMS and posting system. It’s not optimal, and I don’t have much control over things, or any really. The people with admin access don’t seem to be significantly more informed about WordPress than I am either.
This is a bit frustrating for a few reasons, not least of which is that I need to monitor our posts to figure out what performs best, and it’s almost impossible to tell since we have two counts that never agree and typically vary wildly. Screenshot here:
https://preview.redd.it/zktrowi8jayc1.png?width=374&format=png&auto=webp&s=3784e195b6889a6e1093e5e772856db65f000cd1
The bar graph on the right is, I believe, the default wordpress viewcount column. If I mouseover it gives me alt text that says “Post Views,” and there’s no alt text for the left side.
I’ve asked the people who decide what widgets are installed and actually fool around with the HTML what these mean and they don’t know. I can’t find any rhyme or reason for the counts, which you’ll note are sometimes higher on one side than the other, and rarely by a consistent number.
The only things I know for sure are that the scheduled ones at least agree on there being 0 views, and I know because of comments and social media shares that the third from the bottom, with 585 views on the left column, is probably one of our most popular for this time range.
I’m at my wits end, so at this point I don’t even really want to fix it, just want to figure out what is happening. Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
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Google Analytics is the only thing people really trust. Just get rid of anything that does counting inside WP – most of them don’t properly filter out bot/spam traffic.
If this is a WordPress.org site then those are custom. There’s really no way to know what the numbers are without knowing more about your site.
CloudFlare is a very good option, though the analytics aren’t that robust. Google Analytics is another, but a large percent of it is blocked by browser tracking
protection these days so I don’t consider the number to be accurate.