A decade ago, visitor counters were all the rage, telling people how many visitors had dropped by. And even though we have detailed stats today, many bloggers still want to tell the world how popular their site is – hence, the utopia58 Visitor Counter was born.

To use, install and activate, then move the widget into position on your site (via the Appearance; Widgets menu). The widget will be labelled “Visitor Counter”.

That’s it.

Well, you can do a bit more, using the edit settings in the Settings; Visitor Counter menu:

• You can change the title text that appears over the counter.
• You can change the counter value (for example, to reset it, or to set it to a realistic current count).
• You can edit the blurb text – the text that has the counter value embedded in it. To do this, remember to use ## as a placeholder where the count will be inserted. So a blurb like this:

  Welcome - you are visitor ##!

  Becomes

  Welcome - you are visitor 15,024!

  When displayed on the site.

Finally, note that the widget will keep track of every page view on your site when it is called – so if you have a web page without a sidebar for example, the widget will not be loaded, and so won’t count the page.

You can download the plugin via the Plugins page – look for Simple Site Counter (utopia58).