Show the Most Popular Articles of Your blog without a Plugin

There are quite a few plug-ins that show the most popular posts of your blog. Its good to show them because that actually tells your new visitors where the crowd have been partying and its good for you to track the progress of your strong articles too. But do you really need another plug-in for this small a task? Well most of the solutions offered in the web talk of widgets and plug-ins. Let me give you a better solution that needs no plug-in.

I hope you are already accustomed to the free analytics sharing service, gadging. You can read the article to know how to use it for the improvement of your blog. But how do you use it to show the most popular articles in your blog?

Step 1: Learn How to Set Up Gadging for Your Blog

1. Go to your google analytics account.
2. Click on View Report -> e-mail.Check Schedule
3. There is a field called same to others. write ga@gadging.com
4. Uncheck Send to me
5. In the subject field place your blog URL, let’s say https://blog.taragana.com
6. Keep the format XML
7. Check Date/Range as daily
8. Press Schedule

This ensures that you send daily report to gadging.com and they will capture the information and show the statistics in their website.Check the screen-shot below if you wish.

Step 2: How to Get the Most Popular articles from Gadging and Show it to Your blog?

1. Gadging gives you feeds of information (literally) about the most popular articles in your blog. Copy the feed URL
2. Open Your Administrative panel in Wordpress
3. In sidebar.php paste this code
   

   < ?php require_once(ABSPATH . WPINC . ‘/rss-functions.php’);
   echo ‘< ol>’;
   get_rss(’https://analytics.gadging.com/44/most-popular/feed’, $num = 5);
   echo ‘< /ol>’;
   ? >

Note:

• Paste your blog’s analytics link in place of https://analytics.gadging.com/44/most-popular/feed and number of articles you want to show at $num.
• Get rid of the spaces between < ?, ? >, < ol and < /ol

Save and exit and you are done. Isn’t this easy?