Visitor counters for sites allow you to keep statistics of attendance for different periods of time: a day, a week and the entire period of the resource's existence. They can also collect information about which search queries visitors come from. You can install the counter on any site, including those created on the WordPress management system.
The counter code in the WordPress system is installed in the template files. It is best to place it at the bottom or in the sidebar of your site. If you want the counter to be located at the bottom, then its code must be inserted into the footer.php file, and if you install it in the sidebar, then the code is inserted into the sidebar.php file or into widgets (if available in the site template).
How do I find the footer.php and sidebar.php files?
These are the template files. To find them, you need to go to the control panel (console) under the site administrator's login. The control panel has a menu, usually located on the left side. In the menu, you need to find the "Appearance" tab and expand it by clicking the mouse. In the open menu, go to the "Editor" tab. You will see a list of all template files available for editing. This list contains the footer.php (footer) and sidebar.php (sidebar) files.
You can also use widgets, for this you need to open the "Appearance" tab in the control panel, find the "Widgets" item in it, and from the "Available widgets" side block drag a free widget with the inscription "Free text or HTML code" onto the block with the inscription "Sidebar". Then the counter will be located in the sidebar with widgets.
Where to insert the counter code
To set the counter in the footer.php or sidebar.php files, you do not need to understand how WordPress templates work, and you do not need to know the php and html programming language. It is enough to find the opening tag in the template file and insert the counter code after it. In WordPress, this tag might look like> and the counter code should be inserted after this tag on a new line.
It is advisable to close the counter code from indexing by search engines. To do this, you need to arrange it as follows the counter code.
Which counter to choose?
For WordPress, you can use absolutely any counter that suits you in terms of its functionality and appearance. It can be liveinternet, Yandex Metrics, Warlog, Rambler, HotLog, Easy Counter, TOP Mail.ru, Openstat, Google Analytics, HitMeter and any other counter. All of them are installed according to the same scheme, that is, in the footer.php or sidebar.php files. You can install several counters at the same time, then their codes are best placed one under the other. Some webmasters place multiple counters to take up space at the bottom of the page.
