Over at my code snippets site, I keep track of the most popular posts and display a list in the sidebar. It’s an easy way to highlight the site’s best content and share top snippets with visitors. There are numerous plugins available for displaying your site’s popular posts, but they tend to be overkill and/or employ weird algorithms that are just unnecessary and not always accurate.

For example, a lot of plugins and techniques calculate popular posts based on number of comments. These days I’m just not sure if that’s a relevant measure of popularity. Some sites have comments disabled, and other sites receive very few comments in general, so going the comment-count route just doesn’t work.

What I wanted was a simple way of counting hits and displaying a simple list of the most popular posts. This DigWP tutorial explains how to do it with two easy steps. Sound good? Let’s dig in..