I noticed a certain pattern a long time ago – when I published my articles on Facebook that I had previously posted on the website, the number of views of these entries on my website increased very quickly. This is not currently the case, so I asked what the reason could be. I guess that’s why you’re linking to posts from your site on social media, to ultimately drive traffic to your site, right?
Ah, I see. In that case yes, you’re correct, traffic from external sites should count as well as long as your actual articles load in browser when the visitor clicks on a Facebook link for example. If that’s not the case you’ll want to document which articles are seemingly being affected, check for error codes on your browser console and/or server log, etc. to see whether there are any issues that could be preventing WPP from tracking some of these visits.
It looks like the view counter under the article header is not being loaded via AJAX – that’s exactly what I mean, as everything was rendered on the fly before.
I suppose you probably were not using a caching plugin before? Either that or something happened on the theme side. If I had to guess I’d say that it’s the former and that you’re noticing these views-count-not-updating issue now that W3 Total Cache is installed on your site.
I understand that I can’t change it in the settings of the WPP plugin itself, can only a theme update help?
Yes, the theme would need to somehow load the views counter via AJAX so it doesn’t get cached by W3TC.
Alternatively, you could also:
- consider disabling the W3TC plugin altogether, that way all of your content would be rendered dynamically instead of it being static, including the views counter (keep in mind though that you’d be trading page loading performance for a “live” views counter); or
- consider reducing the W3TC’s page cache expiration time (eg. have it expire on an hourly basis), that way your views counter will only be cached for a short period of time (eg. one hour).
The last option is what I would probably pick while waiting for a response from the ThemeGrill support team. If displaying live numbers is a must though then you’ll want to choose either of the other two solutions listed above.