Make PHP counter

It is always good to know how many visits a web page has. Most of the hosting companies offer great tools for monitoring your web site visitors behavior but often you just need to see how many times a web page has been visited. Using PHP and a plain text file this has never been easier. The example below uses a flat-text database so no MySQL database is needed. I am currently working on a more advanced counter script which gives a lot more details about each visits and I will post it on site when it is done.

First, lets make a new php page and also a count.txt file with just 0 digit in it. Upload the count.txt file on your web server. Depending on server configuration you may need to change the permission for this file to 777 so it is writable by the counter script that we are going to use. Now, lets do the actual PHP code.

<?php

$count = file_get_contents("count.txt");

$count = trim($count);

$count = $count + 1;

$fl = fopen("count.txt","w+");

fwrite($fl,$count);

fclose($fl);

?>

First line opens the count.txt file and reads the current counter value. Then the trim() function is used to remove any new line characters so we have an integer. On the next line we increment the current counter value by one and then using the fopen, fwrite and fclose commands we write the new value to our count.txt file.

Please, note that this counter is not suitable for web pages that have many visitors. A large number of file read/writes may corrupt the counter value. For high traffic web sites you should consider using a MySQL based web counter script.