Excellent plugin with good support from its dev

Thanks for your kind words ?? I fixed the link!

https://maxime.sh/paypal

Maxime: For some reason that PayPal link does not work properly for me here in the U.S. (Tried on my Android tablet.)

Try this one?

Success!

Thanks! You’re awesome ??

The plugin is working well. It seems when I set it for hourly cache flush it eventually gets an error from google (too many transactions per day), but at six hour cache flushes, it seems to go all day ok. I wonder if it might be a good idea to have some in-between numbers. I assume the number of posts on a site is the key factor that governs how many cache flushes will work for a given site? Possibly also the count numbers, since that would increase the number of digits in the data. (I don’t know how the data packets are formatted.) I’d be keen to experiment with 4 hours instead of 6 hours cache flush. Is there a place where I can manually set the number in the plugin source for testing purposes?

The plugin is only one file, you can this pretty easily if you want to try. It’s around line 420.

I made a revised “v1.38b” with alternative cache refresh delays of 2, 4, 6, 8, 12, and 24 hours. Two hours caused occasional google API errors (too many transactions per day), so I’m now testing four hours. My site has about 1,500 posts. Most posts have 4- to 5-digit counts, and only a handful get into 6-digits. I don’t know what causes the google errors, i.e. whether the count values matter, or just the number of lines in the downloaded list. If four hours seems solid for a few days, I’ll probably change the options to be finer grained, such as 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 24 etc. I’ll report back after I’ve got it under control. Thanks again for your great plugin and excellent support!

Good! My advice is to have the standard 24-hour cache because usually you don’t need really up-to-dates numbers (especially since GA doesn’t update itself very often). Glad you found your sweet spot ??

I think that’s probably true for 99 percent of WordPress sites. In my case, it’s a popular tech news site so we get a lot of views on the 2-3 new articles we publish each day. As a result, having the counter update ever few hours is very helpful. Actually we don’t need such frequent updates on posts older than the latest 20, so it would be enough to only update those at a rate faster than daily. Cheers!

Your plugin continues to work extremely well, now that I’ve set the cache flush delay time to 4 hours. I just discovered a minor problem (bug?), that perhaps you can handle in a future update. We noticed that two posts are showing zero in their post views counter, even though Google Analytics reports non-zero values for both online. It seems like the discrepancy may be due to each post having a micron (μ) character in its URL (slug). Is it possible that the micron character is keeping the plugin from associating the downloaded Analytics counts with the respective posts in those two cases? If so, is it fixable? Or, is there a set of constraints that need to be adhered to in order to be sure the counters get set as desired?

Thanks!
-Rick

Hi Rick,

Thanks for your message. I’ve updated the plugin but didn’t bump the version currently, so you have to re-install it to try. I’ve added the 4-hour delay and (hopefully) fixed the URL encoding issue.

Let me know if the fix works and I’ll bump a new version in that case!

Best regards

Hi Maxime,

That sounds great! I’ll test it shortly and will let you know how it goes.

Thanks!

-Rick

Hi Maxime,

Good news, that fixed the problem with the lost views for URLs (slugs) with μ characters. I suppose it will now allow other characters that wordpress allows to occur in the URLs that it generates. Thanks also for adding the 4 hour refresh option. I created my own “v1.3.8c” but will get in sync with your update when it comes out. Thanks for handling this so quickly!

Best regards,
-Rick

Awesome! I’ve updated the script with version 1.3.9. Thanks ??