How to Display Post Views in the WordPress Admin Dashboard

As a content manager of a website, you probably want to know the number of views of each blog post on your site. You can classify the posts from that to know which ones are good, which ones need to be improved. Display the number of post views in the admin dashboard helps you to evaluate the post’s quality more easily.

Although there are many ways to display the views in the frontend of a WordPress website including manual coding and using a plugin, there are a few plugins can display it in the admin dashboard.

After researching and trying some plugin, I found that Simple Post Views Count plugin can do it in both backend (admin dashboard) and frontend. It’s quite simple to show the numbers in the admin dashboard as below:

Step 1: Install and Activate the Plugin

Simple Post Views Count is a free plugin so you can install it directly from your admin dashboard as well as download from wordpress.org.

Step 2: Configure the Plugin

Right after activating the plugin, you will be navigated to a new screen in the settings as the following.

You can go to this screen by going to the Settings menu > Simple Post Views Count.

In that screen, configure the items as you want:

• How many seconds should the visitor spend on post, be considered as a "page read": this plugin set this item is 8 in default. However, you should adjust it. In my opinion, if your website loads fast, you should decrease it, and vise versa.
• Count logged-in members (editor or above) PAGEVIEW?: if all of your users are the internal members, you should choose No to eliminate the views from them.

Finally, press the Save Changes button to finish.

Additional tips:

• If you want to display the post views in the frontend, you should put the shortcode to where you want and configure the other items in the above settings screen.
• This plugin also allows you to get or increase the view programmatically by using the spvc_get_viewcount($post_id); and spvc_increase_viewcount($post_id); functions.

Step 3: Check the Result

Now, back to the Post menu in your admin dashboard, you will see a new column named Views in the post list. That is the number of views as you want to see.

Final Words

This is a simple way to display the post views in the admin dashboard, isn’t it? If you just need those numbers in the admin, Simple Post Views Count is the best to help.

On the other hand, if you want to show it in the frontend, you may consider other plugins. From my point of view, to show it at the right place with the right beauty, you still need to use a shortcode or manual coding no matter which plugin you use, especially when you use a WordPress theme. So, whatever plugin you are using will bring a similar way to show in the frontend.

I hope that this tutorial can bring you a useful tool to help you evaluate your website content. If you have any ideas for this, please leave a comment.