photo credit: David Locke1

Ajay D’Souza has done it again and brought fellow WordPress users another much needed plugin called Top 10. This plugin counts daily/total visits per post and displays the most popular posts based on the number of views. Now you might just smirk and say that this is just another popular post plugin, but if you continue reading, I will go over how this plugin is different from many other popular posts plugins.

What’s special about Top 10?

If you use WP Super Cache, you have probably figured out that you cannot use many statistics plugins because they will not count or display statistics properly. Luckily Top 10 plugin utilizes Javascript to perform all post counting and statistics displaying. Some other WP Super Cache compatible plugins only count statistics correctly, but do not display them correctly.

Why not use WP-PostViews to count posts views?

In the past, I had a hand in making WP-PostViews work with WP Super Cache. It was one of the first statistics plugins that were compatible with WP Super Cache. Since then, I believe that the plugin has become a bit dated, and I highly recommend Top 10 as a suitable replacement. Here are my reasons why:

1. WP-PostViews counts views using Javascript, but does not display them using Javascript. Because of that, your view count will remain static to the visitor until your cache files expire
2. Top 10 displays view counts in the admin edit posts section.
3. Top 10 includes popular posts widgets for your sidebar

Feature request

Of course no software is perfect (my day job is a Test Engineer), so I have only a couple of minor suggestions for Ajay (you probably already have these on your to-do list).

1. The popular posts list displays the number of views for each posts. It would be nice to be able to turn that off
2. Right now, the plugin uses Javascript to display the number of views, but it does not use Javascript to display the top daily posts list. It would also be nice to retrieve this list via Javascript because the daily popular list can change often within one day. This isn’t really needed for the all-time popular posts widget though since that list shouldn’t change very much.
3. On the WordPress admin “Edit Posts” page, it would be nice to be able to sort posts by view counts there, so you can navigate through pages to figure out how all of your posts rank among themselves.

Bottom line

This plugin is perfect for you if you use WP Super Cache and want to track page view and display a list of popular posts. If you use WP-PostViews, I recommend moving over to Top 10 instead because of better WP Super Cache compatibility and extra features.

photo credit: duplamox

Ajay D’Souza who regularly writes on Weblog Tools Collection had recently updated a plugin called ‘Where did they go from here?‘.  Originally developed by Mark Ghosh, this plugin keeps track of where your readers go after reading a post and displays this list at the end of your post.  This works just like Amazon’s “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” feature on their product page.

I never noticed this plugin before and I’m quite surprised that I have missed it considering how useful it is.

What makes it special?

Now you might think that this is just another related posts plugin, but actually it is not.  With related posts, you are using predetermined algorithms to pick related posts.  With this plugin, you let your visitors’ behavior decide which posts are related.

Having a combination of both a related posts plugin and this “Where did they go from here?” plugin can go a long way towards reducing your visitor bounce rate.  I have taken the dive and installed it on my blog.  Installation and setup was extremely easy (most likely because of Ajay’s admin facelift).  You can see in action it at the end of this post.

Minor drawback

Of course no software is perfect.  The only thing I don’t like about the plugin is that upon initial activation, you will see something like “Readers who viewed this post also viewed: -N/A” for all of your posts.  For a not so heavy traffic blog like mine, this will probably stay on some my post pages for a week or so depending on how popular they are.  It would be a bit cleaner to not display the plugin text at all if there are no records of visitors from that post page.

Bottom line

Overall I am quite impressed with the plugin for its usefulness and ease of installation.  I give it 5 stars and encourage you to check it out for yourself.  The 5-minute installation can help you reduce your bounce rate dramatically.