Alright, here it goes:
@mischaellstein, since you’re using a caching plugin you should also enable the Ajaxify widget feature (see Settings > WordPress Popular Posts > Tools). This is to keep WP Fastest Cache from caching the popular posts listing on your sidebar.
I checked a couple of your posts and WPP seems to be registering the visits correctly. Just to be safe, you should also clear WPFC’s cache to make sure everything works as expected. This is something you want to do everytime you upgrade / install a plugin, switch to a different host, or upgrade WordPress itself.
Give it a shot and let me know how it goes, alright?
@dmartinng in your case, data sampling is to “blame” here.
Starting WPP v.3.2.0, GoDaddy enforces data sampling on every site using WPP for performance reasons (to keep this topic short, you can read the whole story here).
I’m going to quote myself here:
How does Data Sampling work?
Every time someone visits one of your posts / pages, WPP will generate random number between 1 and N, being N the sample rate. If the random number turns out to be 1, then the views count of that post / page will be incremented by N.
The general idea is that in theory it should take N tries to hit number 1 (the probability of that is 1/N). In the long run, it’ll increase the views count value by 1 for each visit without constantly querying the database.
… and …
But wouldn’t that have an impact on the accuracy of the statistics?
Yes, the count may be off at first but the more visits that come through the more accurate this will be overall. It’s a trade-off between accuracy and performance.
It’s possible to adjust the sample rate from the admin section (read below for the how-to). The default value is 100. For sites with low / medium traffic, lowering the sample rate is recommended: the lower it is the more accurate the views count will be, but it’ll also mean increasing the frequency of database writes. If your site gets a lot of visitors, please use common sense and keep the sampling rate as high as possible.
Keep in mind that as you experiment with the sample rate value, it is to be expected that the statistics may be off (as I mentioned earlier before). If possible, avoid changing the value too often.
The default value (100) is for high-traffic sites, say around 150k-250k page views per day. Since your site’s kinda new I’m guessing it doesn’t get that many visits yet and so you should consider lowering the sample rate value.
